Solar-powered plant kills 25,000 people in Kenya

According to the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the World Health Organization (WHO), about 33% of the planet's population has no access to safe drinking water. It is estimated that 50% of humans will live in regions that will suffer from scarcity in 2025.

The United Nations (UN) states that a person needs between 50 and 100 liters of water a day to ensure that their basic needs are met and that their health is not compromised in any way. However, large cities in Africa and Asia are already facing a water crisis.

In this sense, the search for technological solutions is increasingly urgent. Currently, the most promising is the transformation of salt water into sweet. Industrial scale desalination is the best alternative to overcome a global water crisis.

Image: GivePower / Disclosure

We have a good example of this in Kenya. There, a nonprofit organization called GivePower built a solar-powered desalination plant. Inaugurated in 2018, the structure is capable of producing 75, 000 liters of drinking water and quenching thirst 25, 000 people a day.

"Humankind needs to act quickly to address the increasingly severe global water crisis in the developing world, " said Hayes Barnard, president of the organization. GivePower does its part in applying the solar energy field experience for drinking water generation.

Building the desalination plant in Kenya took a month and cost $ 500, 000. She is expected to return $ 100, 000 a year

The organization was created in 2013 as a nonprofit division of SolarCity, a company that visionary Elon Musk created to produce solar panels and eventually merged with Tesla. It was at this point that Barnard took over GivePower and decided to make it independent.

Building the desalination plant in Kenya took a month and cost $ 500, 000. It is expected to return $ 100, 000 per year and thus contribute to the construction of other similar complexes. Barnard's main goal is to bring drinking water to 2 billion people around the globe.

However, the solar-powered desalination plant not only promises to contribute to overcoming the water crisis. As people's basic needs are met, communities suffering from water scarcity will survive and eventually flourish.