This week, leaders and influencers from around the world met in Paris to discuss climate change and hopefully work out a pact that will limit carbon emissions from every country and put the brakes on global warming trends across the globe. Here at home in California we’ve embraced renewable energy to solve an entirely different […]
Recent news sources and weather reports have warned California residents that the coming El Niño will be the most severe on record since the El Niño of 1997-98. Many of these reports have inspired relief in Californians, with the hope that heavy rainfall across the state this winter will restore California’s water reserves to their […]
Solar desalination technology provides a way to remove salt from agricultural drainage water to create a new source of freshwater. Climate change and new environmental policies regarding water usage have forced many Californians to start making difficult choices: Should we invest in more efficient water-saving devices or risk paying a fine for under-conserving? Drill a […]
This month we sat down with Dr. Matthew Stuber, co-founder of WaterFX and HydroRevolution and Head of Process Systems Engineering to tell us more about how solar thermal desalination technology actually works. The new HydroRevolution plant will utilize the Aqua4 technology developed by WaterFX and their partners, ATSI engineering, to create a green solution to […]
Megan Rupe from KSEE24 News tours the WaterFX demonstration plant in Firebaugh California.
The past few months have highlighted a lively debate in California as to who has a right to use the dwindling reserves of freshwater. Agriculture is repeatedly called out as the largest water user, comprising up to 80% of the state’s water use every year, and therefore the target of many water conservationists and environmentalists […]
It will not happen overnight, but California is on the verge of a hydro-revolution; the beginning of a radical transformation that will dramatically increase the amount of available water. It has already happened in other parts of the world. From where we stand today, this transformation sounds quite unlikely. There are those in California who […]
With phase I of the WaterFX demonstration plant with the Panoche Water and Drainage District complete, we are now moving into Phase II, which will prove that solar desalination can achieve zero discharge. Zero discharge desalination (ZDD) using Aqua4™ overcomes two hurdles that have consistently plagued conventional seawater desalination: low water recovery and high brine […]
There has been a lot of discussion on the topic of desalination in California lately as a source of water to combat drought (see News10 ABC “drought buster”) and it’s apropos to the ongoing dialogue about the environmental consequences typically associated with desalination, namely what to do with the salt? It’s important to first point […]
Looking back on 2013 marks a turning point in the sustainable use of water in California’s agricultural industry. In partnership with the Panoche Drainage District, we demonstrated that drainage water is not an unusable byproduct of irrigation in the Central Valley, but rather an important water resource that should be valued. For many years Panoche […]
