35,000 people now have fresh drinking water thanks to this solar-powered desalination plant.

You might turn on the faucet without a second thought, but clean drinking water is not a guarantee for everyone. Approximately 2.2 billion people around the world don’t have access to safe water. Kiunga, Kenya was one of those communities. A few miles from the Somalia border, the small village was forced to cook, drink, and bathe with blackish contaminated water. The nonprofit organization GivePower recognized the “disastrous impact” that the lack of clean water had on the people living there, so they decided to use clean energy to transform the residents’ lives.

GivePower began its efforts in providing clean energy to struggling communities by first installing solar panels on 2,500 schools in 17 countries. After seeing the impact and scalability of the project, they began to consider their next evolution. What are the most important uses for human beings that need electricity? “We believe the number one is water,” Hayes Barnard, Founder and President of GivePower said.

In May 2018, the organization began installing its first micro-grid water desalination system in order to turn the ocean saltwater into fresh drinking water. To do this, they took a 20-foot shipping container and integrated a 75,000-liter-per-day system that was designed to work with a solar panel array.[…]

More: Solar-Powered Plant Turns Ocean Saltwater Into Clean Drinking Water