National Research Foundation Singapore - Desalination XPRIZE

DESALINATION XPRIZE
SPONSORED BY NATIONAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION SINGAPORE

#desalXPRIZE #Visioneers2016

http://www.xprize.org/visioneers/teams/desalination

Bringing water abundance to communities around the globe

Water is essential for life. It is also abundant, covering 70 percent of the planet. But water that is appropriate for human consumption, agriculture, and industry makes up only one percent of our water sources.

Access to water is not universal around the globe, and the ways we currently use water are not fully sustainable. Today, 780 million people do not have access to clean water. To feed the world’s population in 2025, agriculture will require fresh water equal to 20 Nile rivers or 100 Colorado rivers. By 2050, there will be a 400 percent rise in manufacturing water demand.

The Grand Challenge for water is to make the world’s water sources accessible and sustainable—for human development, economic growth, and the health and biodiversity of the planet.

“By 2025, 20 percent of the world’s population will face water scarcity. But what if we could incentivize breakthrough technologies to change that? We have an opportunity to leverage the power of innovation to create new, sustainable sources of fresh water that can support both people and the planet.”

- TEAM DESALINATION

Landscape:

Desalination—the process of converting seawater or brackish water into fresh water—is a key solution for helping to address water scarcity. Today, there are already more than 18,000 desalination plants operating around the world. However, expanded use of desalination faces significant challenges: energy intensity, high cost, and environmental issues including impacts to marine life from seawater intake, disposal of waste brine, and a high emissions footprint.

Today, researchers are working on next generation technologies that could revolutionize the future of desalination. New business models are emerging that pair desalination plants with zero-emission renewable energy. Smaller, distributed systems have the potential to ease deployment. A Desalination XPRIZE has the potential to reimagine what desalination looks like today and incentivize exponentially better models for addressing water scarcity in the future.

Prize Sponsor:

NRF Singapore sets the national direction for policies, plans and strategies for research, innovation and enterprise. The NRF aims to transform Singapore into a vibrant R&D hub that contributes towards a knowledge-intensive, innovative and entrepreneurial economy; and make Singapore a magnet for excellence in science and innovation.

Singapore has no natural resources and limited land for water catchment or water reclamation facilities. The new innovations generated from the Water Desalination XPRIZE will contribute to Singapore’s efforts to grow into a global hydro-hub of innovation.

http://xprize.org

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ABOUT XPRIZE

XPRIZE is an educational (501c3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to bring about radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity, thereby inspiring the formation of new industries and the revitalization of markets that are currently stuck due to existing failures or a commonly held belief that a solution is not possible. XPRIZE addresses the world's Grand Challenges by creating and managing large-scale, high-profile, incentivized prize competitions that stimulate investment in research and development worth far more than the prize itself. It motivates and inspires brilliant innovators from all disciplines to leverage their intellectual and financial capital.

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