Cosmotaics – Greening deserts through solar farms

More than a third of the earth’s surface are arid. In these areas the annual precipitation is lower than the potential evaporation. Rivers typically dry up before reaching the sea. Here, Cosmotaics come into play. The students from Vienna are radically rethinking photovoltaic systems for desert regions by turning solar farms into water farms. The systems designed by Cosmotaics extract moisture from the ambient air, which condenses on the specially coated panels. To date, the concept of harvesting water from the air only has been tested in mountainous regions by installing fog nets which collect water from the passing air (such as in this pilot project in Peru). Cosmotaics transforms this idea to to desert plains, where there is enough space and ideal conditions for setting-up large-scale solar farms which now produce water alongside the electricity. The potential to create positive impact is huge: The water can be used to grow agricultural products, for example. The water can also be used to cleaned the panels from desert dust to further increases their efficiency.

Cosmotaics is the winner of the Social Impact Award (SIA) Austria 2022. SIA supports young people and students who create systemic change through social innovation. The GOOD project Plasticpreneur also was a SIA award winner.