By Dan Edel
One-third of the people in the world don’t have access to clean drinking water. That’s according to UNICEF and The World Health Organization (WHO), and it is expected that half of the world’s population will live with a water shortage by 2025. Founder and President of GivePower, Hayes Barnard, hopes to help change that.
Back in July of 2018, a nonprofit company called GivePower built a desalinization plant in Kenya in a coastal town called Kiunga. Today that plant is producing 19,800 gallons or 75,000 litres of fresh drinking water every day. That is enough to provide water for around 25,000 people.
Barnard developed GivePower in 2013 as a nonprofit branch of SolarCity. SolarCity ended up merging with Telsa in 2016 but Barnard had already separated GivePower before the merger. He then spent almost two years in San Francisco working on and building a solar-energy power plant that will turn salt water into fresh water and provide electricity for hopefully millions of people.
