I had this idea in high school! I thought it wouldn't work in the desert though, or surely it would already have been tried. Basically, we were reading about j

I had this idea in high school! I thought it wouldn't work in the desert though, or surely it would already have been tried. Basically, we were reading about just how difficult it is to get water out of saltwater in coastal communities, and the massive power costs involved, and I just thought, "well, we sometimes have to use a dehumidifier at home, and I know that that runs on the mains power and could generate easily enough water for two or three of us to survive. Coastal environments have very wet air, so just let the Sun act on the ocean to do the hard part of desalination, and we reap the benefits of clean water?" I gave up because I'd calculated that this would also probably cost more money than poor coastal areas had, but yeah, wind turbines have grown amazingly in the past several years and the principle is pretty sound. (It is not clear what the longer-term environmental impact would be, but it's possible that if we deploy too many of these things, inland droughts could become more severe due to lack of cloud formation.) I'm glad to see that someone has paired renewable energy and automatic solar evaporation with the problem of desalination. Well worth some charity money, though the company as it stands appears to be for-profit. Would be nice to see if a charity could set some of these up in Wajir, Kenya, as a politically safer experiment towards deploying them into the drought-ridden Jubaland in Somalia.