Last week on Thursday, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) announced that it will dedicate $100 million towards an Energy-Water Desalination Hub that will focus on early-stage research and development (R&D) for "energy-efficient" and "cost-competitive" desalination technologies in order to treat non-traditional water sources for multiple use-cases.
This sounds like Somerville startup OffGrid Box's pitch.
Housed at Greentown Labs, the startup was founded in 2016 by Davide Bonsignore, Emiliano Cecchini, Roberto Scaccia and makes modular, compact 6*6*6 shipping container that purifies water and produces electricity -- enough water to drink, power laptops, lights, run Wi-Fi and maybe even power a small hospital.
OffGrid Boxes are deployed at 30 locations around the globe including South Africa, Madagascar, Philippines, Nigeria, Rwanda, the British Virgin Islands, Italy and Oklahoma, in the U.S. In Rwanda, for example, OffGrid Box powers 400 families for gadgets like phone, lights, radio and a small fridges.
Emiliano Cecchini, CEO and co-founder of OffGrid Box, with a doctorate in theoretical physics first met in 2010 co-founder Davide Bonsignore while working at a solar power company in Italy. They worked on a project that involved powering remote kindergartens in the Eastern Cape of South Africa where they had to assemble solar power units and water purification units separately.
OffGrid Box was born when they realized one box could do all the work. "This box gives wifi, purifies water as well as acts as a power source," said Cecchini.
The team worked on the first prototype and the latest iteration of the OffGrid Box can now desalinate close to 5,000 liters of sea water to drinking water every day. The solar panels on a single container can produce 8 kilowatts of power. If used entirely for desalination, the box can desalinate and purify about 4,800 liters of water every day.
How does this work? On a very efficient reverse-osmosis system. There is a polymer membrane with pressure as high as 60 bar (for reference, a car tyre is approximately two bar) that lets water flow through it with the salts, chemicals and pollutants being deposited on the sides. If there is low pressure, water doesn’t go through the membrane. A very strong pump pumps water through this membrane, hence purifying and desalinating the water.
"If you don’t want to use all the power for desalination, you can use it to power a building, hospital, resort," said Cecchini.
OffGrid Box has been a part of the Techstars and MassChallenge and got a grant from The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center to work on lithium batteries. The company currently manufactures the boxes in Italy, but wants to move it to the U.S. and is now scouting for locations in MA.