The Power of the Sun | Breakthrough

[Music] With no water coming from the state-controlled aquifer, this farm relies solely on one well, a well that may be running dry.

"Hello, how are you?"

"Good, good to see you."

Aaron Mandel, chairman of the company Water Effects, has come to evaluate the problem.

"This is one of our fields. We have about 12,200 acres in total that we farm, and this year we're only able to plant about half of it because of the lack of water supply. So that's what our wells can reach."

"Okay, so 50% of the land is actually going to lay fallow."

Exactly. The farm needs a new source of water, and Aaron believes he has a solution.

Sarah is facing the same problem a lot of farmers in the Central Valley face, which is lack of water supply that is causing her to have to fallow a lot of land. She actually has all of the water resources she needs right below her feet.

There is a vast pool of subsurface drain water just beneath the Central Valley; it's runoff from irrigation. Unfortunately, the ground is naturally salty, so the water is tainted.

But Aaron has devised an affordable way to filter out the salt, reclaim the water, and feed it into the aquifer.

"The easiest way to desalinize water is to boil it, but on a large scale, this consumes vast amounts of energy."

"You know, that'll open and close as we're tracking our temperature, uh, for the array. Okay, this valve is at least half open."

Aaron and Water Effects co-founder and director of engineering Dr. Matt Stuber are purifying salt water using an energy source California has in abundance: Sunshine.

"What we've done is developed this plant which removes the salt from the soil and returns this region with impaired soil back to arable farmland."

[Music] This solar array works like a magnifying glass; it concentrates the energy of the sun 36 times. That energy heats the mineral oil inside these pipes to over 350°.

This creates high-pressure steam that boils the salt out of the water pumped up from beneath the plant.

"So this is where the final product comes out; it's completely pure fresh water. So we create two products with this from one waste source: freshwater and the salty minerals."

Now the salt crystals are very valuable and can be captured and used in many industries.

Water Effects now has funding to build a plant that can desalinate 1.6 billion gallons of water per year.

Aaron and Matt believe this breakthrough technology can transform the Central Valley and many other arid regions on Earth.