If you’ve ever watched water drip out of a window air conditioning unit, you’ve seen the operating principle of Eole Water’s new wind turbine in action. Tests of the turbine in Abu Dhabi have yielded between 500 and 800 liters of water a day, and the company thinks it can get it up to a cool 1,000 liters — not bad for a desert.
Eole’s turbine runs a compressor that condenses water from the air, and the 30 kilowatts of power it simultaneously produces allow it to pump that water to a reservoir. Given the fantastical amount of energy required to run a desalination plant, the turbine could be an alternative for countries hard up for fresh water. Of course, once we have thousands of these things up and running, it will probably affect the local climate, but it’s not as if we aren’t already conducting unintentional experiments in geoengineering.
h/t Kristen Korosec
