Wright and Craig are veterans of the oil and gas industry, and Quidnet's technology is like a green riff on fracking. Later, the system lets the Earth squeeze the water back up under pressure, using it to drive generators. Instead of pumping water uphill, the company's system sends it underground through a pipe reaching at least a thousand feet down. Quidnet patented a new kind of pumped hydro. In other words, alternatives to massive lithium-ion batteries: "A feature in this week's issue of The New Yorker highlights current efforts to use gravity, heat, momentum, air pressure, and other methods to store large amounts of energy for the electricity grid." Solar and wind power are "intermittent," points out Slashdot reader silverjacket. The technology could also possibly be used for hydrogen production, oil and gas separation, and more. From there, it hopes to scale globally to help with disaster relief. The company plans to sell its first units to sailors before moving into the emergency preparedness space in the U.S., which it estimates to be a $5 billion industry. With its winnings, Nona will build more prototypes to give to early customers. "Our device runs on less power than a cell phone charger." The company has already developed a small prototype that produces clean drinking water. "Because we can do all this at super low pressure, we don't need the high-pressure pump, so we don't need a lot of electricity," says Crawford, who co-founded the company with MIT Research Scientist Junghyo Yoon. In contrast, Nona uses a technology developed in MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics that removes salt and bacteria from seawater using an electrical current.
The traditional approach for water desalination relies on a power-intensive process called reverse osmosis. The device is roughly the size and weight of a case of bottled water and is powered by a small solar panel. MIT News reports: Nona Desalination says it has developed a device capable of producing enough drinking water for 10 people at half the cost and with 1/10th the power of other water desalination devices. The winner of this year's MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is commercializing a new water desalination technology.
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