Marshall Islands Kwajalein Atoll Water Project

The Marshall Islands Kwajalein Atoll Water Project will serve the 171 households across the six islands that have struggled with water access and security. In addition to providing the human basic need for drinking water, we are addressing the linkages of equitable access, health, and economics. This investment in climate-resilient water services shows a commitment by local and international governments to provide for remote and rural populations. Estimates by Vivid Economics show that universal access to safely managed water supplies could prevent up to 6 billion cases of diarrhea and 12 billion cases of parasites between 2021-2040, and save $36-37 billion per year in global health care costs -- a return of 21 times the initial cost of implementing safe water systems. SOURCE Hydropanels were designed to be scaled to meet the drinking water needs of any location - from a single home to an entire community. The systems can be expanded to larger “farms” of interconnected Hydropanels to generate large volumes of water for community supply and larger-scale resilience and storage, along with consumption models that include ATM-style and circular distribution models to serve larger communities. Similar to power purchase agreements, Hydropanel arrays can also be contracted in an innovative financing vehicle called a “Water Purchase Agreement” or “WPA”. WPAs charge customers a fixed price per liter that is generated over the length of a 5-15 year contract. Hydropanel arrays are sized to meet the volume needed and built, operated, and maintained by Source at no cost to the customer. Importantly, a single WPA can deploy technology across a large area of low-density population - for example, a single WPA can provide household drinking water to 10 islands, 100 villages or 1,000 schools at the point of consumption, which makes it dramatically cheaper than the extension of traditional centralized infrastructure. The potential of this model is access and scale - a regional financing opportunity to rapidly enable long term, resilient access to drinking water to households in the same way that renewable microgrids have done so for electricity access and cell phone towers have done so for information access.