Photo from GivePower on Instagram
From Positive Outlooks, submitted by Nancy Bate
Last year, GivePower, a non-profit branch of the Tesla subsidiary Solar City, installed a newly-developed solar-powered desalination system in Kiunga, a small town in Kenya. This new system is more sustainable than older processes, and provides a long-term solution. A “solar water farm,” it is able to produce 50 kilowatts of energy and run two water pumps 24 hours a day.
Kiunga is home to 3,500 people, who ordinarily must travel for more than an hour just to collect water, only available from a well found on the same channel that animals use to bathe. Water taken from there is full of pollutants and parasites that are potentially harmful and disease-causing.
“You see children inside of these villages, and they’ve got these scars on their stomachs or their knees because they got so much salt in their wounds. They were basically poisoning their families with this water,” said Hayes Barnard, president of GivePower, in an institutional video. Fortunately, Kiunga's location, near the Indian Ocean, makes it the perfect candidate for the world’s first GivePower Solar Water Farm, which has so far been an incredible success.
GivePower is looking into expanding its solar power farm operations in Colombia and Haiti.
