HIBT Lab! SOURCE Global: Cody Friesen

Hello and welcome to How I Built This Lab. I'm Guy Raz. So if you remember Tatooine the desert planet in Star Wars, water was a scarce resource. Rain only came to Tatooine maybe once a decade. So instead, the humans of Tatooine would rely on moisture vaporators. These were small towers that looked like rockets that would capture water vapor from the atmosphere. Now the technology to make this happen.

wasn't just theoretically possible. It actually exists today and is in use in fifty-two countries around the world. It's a device called a hydropanel made by an Arizona-based company called Source. The hydro panel looks a bit like a solar panel, but inside is a series of fans and materials that quite literally create water out of sunlight and air. The technology was developed by an engineer named Cody Friesen, who also founded SORS.

The devices essentially work by drawing the moisture that already exists in our atmosphere. Imagine that the air around us, the troposphere is like a giant invisible store of water. Cody's technology is simply turning that invisible water vapor into drinking water. Right now, each hydropanel can produce about 5 liters of water a day, and the cost of a panel is relatively high, but Cody predicts that the cost will drop dramatically over time.

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