The Exchanges

Q It's a lot of water. And, and that's basically, and I know I'm, I'm kind of reducing this to, um, you know, sort of overly simplistic science, but that's essentially because we are living in the troposphere. Which is this massive, invisible, basically, layer of water vapor. The sun is constantly evaporating that water anyway. So the question is, why don't we just capture that evaporation?

A Exactly. And you have to actually create that phase change, right? So you have to put the energy in to get that, uh, that, that conversion to liquid. And so what we set about was thinking about all the different thermodynamic routes that you could go from the gas phase to the liquid phase using sunlight. And so that's what then led to, okay, well, first of all, right, water vapor is very dilute in the atmosphere. It's, you know, anywhere from one to, let's say, one to five percent by weight. So If we are at that level, how do we concentrate that dramatically, right? So we use a material that concentrates that water vapor by about 10,000 times by volume.

AI assessment note: “you have to actually create that phase change, right? So you have to put the energy in”

Q can generate drinking water nearly anywhere in the world. So, Cody, this technology is not just theoretical. These panels actually exist. They're in operation all over the world, right? And, and, you know, you guys, I think, have deployed these panels in, like, 50 or so countries. Um, There are homes that are using them for drinking water, and by the way, how much water, uh, can each panel produce?

A Yeah, so each, each hydropanel can do up to five liters per day, and when we think about the, the way that, you know, we go to, let's say, show up at a school or at a home, it's really understanding the drinking water needs of that facility, and then putting in arrays of the size that match that need, right? So done in a very similar way to how solar, you know, solar arrays are established to meet the load. Let's take the Navajo Nation, which is 27,000 square miles, so it's about the same land area as West Virginia. About 175,000 Navajo live there. 54,000, let's call it a third of them, have no water at home. Zero. So, uh, we installed at about a little over 500 homes last year. We'll do about 700 homes this year, where we solve the problem of them not having any drinking water at home.

AI assessment note: “each hydropanel can do up to five liters per day”

Q So this is a material that you knew about or came across that is like desiccant in a, you know, like those little bags of juices, do not eat silica. It works the same way. It can concentrate moisture, essentially, and We're jumping ahead, but this is the material that you would eventually put on panels like that kind of look like solar panels, right?

A Yeah, so very similar to those desiccants that you're used to, except for just able to hold a lot more water, do that a lot more quickly, and then able to be cycled. And so the recognition that, okay, okay, if we could concentrate that water vapor onto an adsorbent of one form or another, and then if we could apply Sunlight to those materials in a smart way, we could respire that water vapor into a stream inside of a device and push the dew point inside the device above ambient. So again, back to your daily life, if you are taking a shower and, you know, you like a, you know, hot, steamy shower, you get out and you notice that there's water condensed onto the mirror. That occurs because you push the dew point above the ambient temperature. And of course the mirror is at ambient temperature, and so you get condensation. And so could we, inside of a device, push the dew point up high enough that under all Earth-relevant conditions, we could get condensation? And so that was the sort of the question that had to be answered by the development of what we, you know, now have as a, as a product.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so very similar to those desiccants that you're used to”

Q anywhere in the world. That, that the technology now exists to dig very, very deep, very quickly, like, 20 kilometers down. And, and essentially, anywhere you dig 20 kilometers down, you're gonna hit a geothermal energy source anywhere around the world. This is similar principle. What you're saying is that not just theoretically, but in actual fact, you can produce and bring abundant water to any place on the planet?

A That's right. Yeah, I mean, so today we're in 52 countries, and we've built over 450 projects, um, across six continents, um, and in a lot of the places that we go, we're the lowest cost source of drinking water. And what's sort of fascinating, there, there's no Physical reason, this is a big statement, why these source hydropanels can't eventually be the lowest cost delivered potable water on the planet. Lower cost than what you flush toilets with at home, what you consider sort of free water, which of course is not. So the cost of making a device that is made of earth abundant, sort of industrially abundant materials, and making it Ever more efficient and making ever more efficiently leads to a cost structure over time that is almost impossible to beat by traditional infrastructure, traditional extractive processes. And we just saw that happen with coal, right? Over the last dozen years. Yeah. We are seeing that in real time happening with electrification of transportation. Um, you know, starting with, of course, you know, Tesla's being Better and a better experience than a typical ICE car, an industrial combustion engine car, but now reaching commoditization in a way that's, that's sort of shocking. All you have to do is watch this last Super Bowl to see how quickly the world is changing.

AI assessment note: “That's right. Yeah, I mean, so today we're in 52 countries”

Q Could you make it from existing abundant sources of, like, sunlight and water with sunlight and air?

A Right, exactly. So, and it wasn't even, it wasn't even, the starting point wasn't even air as much as, like, okay, the energy source is sunlight, what could we do? And when I analyzed this, recognizing that the lower part of the atmosphere, the troposphere, uh, Has this insane amount of water vapor in it, 10 to the 16 kilograms. So that's one and then 16 zeros, kilograms of water vapor, about a hundred million years of all of humanity's water needs replaced every single week. The average lifetime of a water molecule in the atmosphere is about seven to nine days. It comes up off the ocean due to sunlight bearing down on the oceans, evaporates, and then eventually rains back within seven to nine days. And so here we have this massive resource that It's actually growing during, due to climate change, but that's a whole nother topic. But we have this massive resource that's everywhere. It's an atmospheric ocean.

AI assessment note: “Right, exactly. So, and it wasn't even, it wasn't even, the starting point”

Q literally, these panels make water out of air and sunlight. And, and do the panels need to be in a, in a very sunny place? Because on the one hand, if it's in a humid environment, right, the panels can pull all that moisture out of the humid air. But on the other hand, if it's in a really dry place, it's, it's presumably getting more power from the sun.

A Yeah, I think, I think actually, Guy, you hit it on the head that there's, there's sort of two competing factors, right? So if you're in Manila, and it's 85% humidity, but it's partially cloudy, the thermodynamic putt is pretty short, right? The distance between 85% and a hundred percent is short. Whereas if you're in Phoenix, and it's five percent humidity, but yet you've got the full, unmitigated sun bearing down, obviously you have the energy to drive the process. So The sort of competing factors are true around the planet. And so you'll see that, for example, in Dubai, we create a very similar amount of water as in Manila, as an example. And so, yes, there are places and times of the year where the amount of water we produce is minimized, but on sort of an average, those places are similar. Probably the worst place for us, of course, is like northern Quebec and, you know, the middle of winter, When it's, you know, -40 out, because of course, not only is there no water vapor in the atmosphere because the saturation concentration is so low, but also there's no liquid water. And so, you know, obviously places with a hard freeze, we don't produce water in the middle of winter, but that same place, Quebec, obviously during the rest of the year has, because they're very high latitudes, you know, have very long days, very high humidity. And so again, yearly average, The amount of …

AI assessment note: “in Dubai, we create a very similar amount of water as in Manila”

Q How do you ensure that the water is clean and drinkable? I mean, it's because essentially it's like rainwater, right? And which can be fine, but doesn't it have to have other properties to taste good and also to be safe?

A Yeah, it actually turns out it's much purer than rainwater, right? So when we, when we actually produce the water, it's effectively distilled water. It's pure water. We then, because Water is the stuff of life. We then ozonate that water. So in other words, we take oxygen molecules from the air, we make O three, and we keep that concentration up while it's stored so that we always have water that's sterile, and then we mineralize that water. So by the time that humans are consuming that water, not only do we know that it's safe and that it's mineralized, so for taste and health, We also know that that's true because every hydropanel is connected to the cloud, and we see data feedback from every hydropanel we've deployed that says, yep, we've produced this amount of water, we have this much water in storage, it's sterile, and it's been mineralized. And by the way, now it's been dispensed. So we've sort of created the world's first renewable, fully digitized drinking water utility, if you will.

AI assessment note: “We then ozonate that water... and then we mineralize that water.”

Q become cheaper, right, than other sources. Non-renewable sources that are harmful to our environment, but you know, it's, it's just hearing, I mean, it seems like no one was really thinking about applying the same concept to water, right? That, that there's, there's possibly another source of fresh water besides what's in the ground and, and, and in our rivers and in our reservoirs that, that we could use instead.

A Exactly. Yeah. And it's sort of the ultimate extractive resource, right? It's either in the ground or it isn't, or it's either rained or it didn't. And You know, when we think about renewables, renewable energy is begotten by free feedstock, right? The feedstock of sunlight or the feedstock of wind. When you're running a coal-fired power plant, the dominant source of cost is the cost of digging up free coal, putting it in a coal car, moving it across the ground, burning that, right? And then dealing with, you know, the, the knock-on effects. Even if coal's very cheap, right? The, the, the coal has to be dug and put in the coal car. That's a linear problem. You can't, you can't change those physics, but if you could make solar PV ever more efficient and make it ever more efficiently, then then eventually we knew that would be lower cost than coal. So in a very similar way, the question that I asked myself about 10 years ago was could we do precisely For water, what we've now done for electricity.

AI assessment note: “could we do precisely For water, what we've now done for electricity.”

Q And when it comes to competitors, I mean, is your feeling, hey, the more the merrier, because this is actually, this is technology that needs to spread around the world?

A Yeah, I mean, anybody who's working on solving water is a hero in my book. I mean, there's, it's an infinite market space for a given company, right? So it's, it's going to take many solutions to solve all problems. From a competitor perspective, I mean, we're the only ones that do what we do, right? There's, there's other folks that Take water from the atmosphere, but they do that in a way that requires high humidity and quite a bit of electricity. So we've solved the problem in a different way. And I think that gives us a large addressable market, about a half a trillion dollar addressable market as it sits right now, again, effectively infinite from where we sit today. And so, you know, there's, there's interest in source because of our unique technology, but also because of the big unlock that we've enabled from a, from market perspective.

AI assessment note: “anybody who's working on solving water is a hero in my book.”

Q and an oxygen atom, right? You, you bash them together and you get water, right? But it's, it's a little more complicated than that. But you knew, and I guess, uh, you know, most scientists know that in theory you can, you can produce water if you get those elements and have the right conditions. Now the question is, how do you really do that? So where do you start?

A Yeah. So, well, first we, we start with humility with respect to data because, you know, what we know whenever we're talking about such a huge problem is that no matter how smart one thinks they are or how smart the team is, the fact is that we are always just sort of taking the data directly ahead of us to invent a little bit, innovate a little bit, and then take more data so that we could sort of fail our way to success, if you will. And so, The starting point, I'm a material scientist, and there are many, many, many materials around us that are, and the term is hygroscopic, right? So with a G, because the hydroscopic would be something that is, uh, attracted to liquid water. Hygroscopic is something that's attracted to water paper. And everything from the reason why you don't go jogging in a cotton shirt, because it's hygroscopic, to when you leave a lid off the sugar bowl, And the sugar gets a little bit clumpy.

AI assessment note: “The starting point, I'm a material scientist, and there are many, many, many materials”

Q In other words, you bottle, you, you sell bottled water, right?

A We sell, yeah, we sell bottled water, but that's a small part of the business. What I'm talking about is our water is a service business that, you know, we'll contract with school systems or with governments to, to sell water based on arrays that we've, that we've built. Um, and then, you know, I think the, the reason why Breakthrough Energy Ventures came in or Fifth Wall came in, which is a real estate backed entity or Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund is, you know, all of these entities are dealing with The challenges associated with water going forward, right? Obviously real estate developers can't, if they have land that design water rights, that's a huge problem, right? You know, there are a number of these investors that are thinking about water at a systemic level, right? And how do we move from linear extractive to sustainable circular, right? And how do we move to a place that is going to work in the future? And, you know, I think we've got, we've got an approach there that is, you know, potentially meaningful.

AI assessment note: “We sell, yeah, we sell bottled water, but that's a small part”

Q can produce about five liters or five liters per day. Okay. And so it's not obviously enough for all your water needs. It's five liters. That's can imagine what a liter of water looks like. But can that change? I mean, is, Is this a technology challenge that, that eventually those same panels will be more efficient, or is that just essentially maximizing what nature provides in air and sunlight?

A Absolutely. So we have an R&D group that reaches about eight years into the future. So, you know, at eight years, it's pretty wild ideas. At five years, it's pretty concrete ideas. At two years, it's becoming productized. So we have a roadmap of substantial increases in productivity over the coming years. In such a way that also reduces the cost. So when we think about the roadmap to go from places that where people either have wells that are not producing potable water, have no potable water, are relying on plastic bottled water, are relying on trucked water or boated water, right? We're directly competitive today in a way that removes all the lack of sustainability issues associated with those approaches, and maybe most importantly, Creates ownership, agency, and democratization over that resource, which is a big unlock when you're talking about something so fundamental to your life. If you don't have good water, it's Maslow's hierarchy all over again, right?

AI assessment note: “we have a roadmap of substantial increases in productivity over the coming years.”