Drinks Billionaire Investing in Affordable Desalination Technology

Meet Rain Maker – technology that can increase the water supply across the globe

Manoj Bhargava, the man behind 5-Hour Energy, believes his affordable desalination technology can equally help wealthy Californians and poor Indians.

If rain doesn’t arrive soon, speculators will start taking bets on whether California can survive what has already been a devastating four-year drought. Many hope that El Niño storms will help replenish groundwater reserves. Relocating millions of people has been floated as a last resort.

But Manoj Bhargava prefers to make his bet—one worth an estimated $4 billion, thanks to 5-Hour Energy, his smash-success energy drink—on his own innovations.

Bhargava’s bottled beverage is ubiquitous, but his name is mostly unknown. Yet for the past several years the self-effacing CEO has been quietly pouring most of his wealth into radical, home-brewed solutions through Stage 2 Innovations, his investment fund. Tucked away in a sprawling R&D facility in the tony Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills are solutions that, Bhargava says, will solve the planet’s most pressing resource scarcities.

Take the Rain Maker, a desalination unit roughly the size of a flatbed truck that relies on a conventional power source to distill seawater into freshwater well beyond Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. A single Rain Maker can be placed in a town with a wastewater plant. In a crisis, hundreds could be stacked on an ocean barge to process seawater. Coastal desalination facilities typically cost billions to construct and require massive amounts of energy. Could the Rain Maker, produced at industrial scale, pull California back from the brink of disaster? The forecast looks promising. Regulators at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility, a testing facility administered in New Mexico by the Department of the Interior, have given it a stamp of approval.

Source: Fortune

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