News release: Could we just get water from the sky?
…. [Environmental Policy Professor Jeff Langholz] has made safe, clean, and reliable water access the focus of a professional career that reads like an adventure novel. … Langholz introduced his clean-water work to a wider audience at last year’s campus open house for prospective students with a talk titled “The Future of Water Is Closer and Better Than You Think,” which feels like required viewing in an increasingly water-insecure world. As part of the presentation, he highlighted a number of decentralized ways to capture life-sustaining moisture—and keep using it—like gray- and black-water recycling, rain harvesting, and atmospheric water generation. The last proves most stunning, and happens by deploying generators of scalable sizes to extract potable H2O from the atmosphere—at volume, using renewable energy, and doing it affordably—and then recycling it indefinitely. … Langholz’s students have pursued a number of projects related to this area, from fog harvesting (with a device called the FogLog) to financing infrastructure for rainwater harvesting systems (Rain Returns), two projects that made the finals of the Startup Challenge Monterey Bay.