There, in a shaded courtyard, we each sample a cup of water that flows from a drinking fountain.
There sit two Friesen’s devices, called Source Hydropanels.
Friesen believes installations like this one could soon be providing clean, quality drinking water to homes, schools and businesses across the United States and beyond – and why not, to rural villages, desert towns or urban slums in the developing world.
“Water stress is a human condition,” says Friesen, who is founder and CEO of Zero Mass Water, the Arizona-based startup that makes Source.
But Friesen, a materials scientist and professor of engineering at Arizona State University, has already installed the Source in eight countries, including Ecuador, Jordan, Mexico and the Philippines.
“With us, you get to hold the result of that solar energy in a cup,” he says.
In 2007, he founded Fluidic Energy, which develops battery technology.
“He’s going to get water out of the air.
He’s done it Arizona.
“There is an awful lot of far from pure water being drunk in the United States,” says Battle, whose Berkeley house Freisen took me for the demonstration of Source.

Solar Powered Condenser Turns Ambient Humidity into Drinking Water.
MIT and UC-Berkeley Scientists recently demonstrated a new device designed to collect water straight from ambient air using only solar power.
This water harvester can even pull moisture in desert climates where humidity is as low as 20 percent.
At any moment, it’s estimated that atmosphere contains about 3,100 cubic miles of water vapor, which is enough to cover the entire surface of the Earth with one inch of water if it fell all at once.
In addition to its most visible form, clouds, atmospheric water is also present in clear air and the entire system is recycled every nine days.
Solar Powered Condenser; Off-Grid Water Harvester Researchers at MIT, in collaboration with the University of California Berkeley, have developed a prototype for a device that pulls water from clear air using solar power.
The device, reported in the journal Science, is an open air chamber containing a lattice-like structure made from a metal-organic framework (MOF), produced at the UC-Berkeley.
By the same year, two-thirds of the global population could be living under water-stressed conditions.
Developing solutions to sanitize water and produce it where it is scarce is a major challenge for many countries.
And there’s no resource more accessible than ambient air.

This solar-powered device harvests water from dry air.
Scientists at MIT and UC Berkeley have created a prototype that does just that — and it only requires 20-30 percent humidity to work.
MOFs are compounds created by combining metals with organic molecules.
In this case, Yaghi and his team at Berkeley created a MOF that binds to water.
It’s a passive device, requiring no other energy source than the sun — and doesn’t even need very bright sunlight to function.
Both Yaghi and Wang believe they’ve barely tapped the concept’s potential.
Future MOFs might be able to absorb 40 percent or more.
Freshwater scarcity is a global problem of immense proportions that does not receive nearly the attention that it should.
Recent estimates show that 4 billion people — that’s two-thirds of the world’s population — experience acute water scarcity at least one month of the year.
California’s historically severe drought has finally just ended, but the state typically experiences big fluctuations in rainfall from year to year.