Hosts: Will Sarni & Tom Freyberg
Guest: Cody Friesen | Founder | Source
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[0:35] TF: “Source […] could be called the poster child of the atmospheric water generation or air to water market. The Arizona startup is setting out to do for drinking water what solar panels have done for electricity, namely disrupt the centralized market. [Cody’s] hydro panel technology takes in sunlight and air to create water from the atmosphere, adding minerals, ozenating and then storing the water for drinking at a later date. After securing an eye watering $50 million of investment from BlackRock, he's under enormous pressure to lead this new market segment against heavy skepticism from seasoned water practitioners that claim it's an expensive way to generate what they perceive to be low volumes of water.”
[11:13] CF: “In the troposphere, lower part of the atmosphere, there's [….] about six times the volume of all the rivers on the planet, at any given time. […] That's like 100 million years worth of all human water. And then […] if we've gone up by approximately one degree Celsius over the last 30 years due to climate change, what's the excess amount of water in the atmosphere? […] That turns out to be […] about 1% more. […] So that resource is not only massive, it's growing. And so […] how do you then, very efficiently and in a distributed way […] make that liquid and make that safe water for consumption?”
[17:29] CF: “Because it's water and because people are consuming it, every single of those hydro panels connects to the cloud. And then we monitor […] 24/7, 92 parameters every hydro panel, so that we know the amount we produce, we know that they're working, we know that the water is safe to consume. […] So really, fully digitizing, fully distributed, renewable water.”
[20:50] CF: “We have to democratize water. And democratization happens exponentially. […] That's what we have to be talking about to bring investment dollars to go solve these problems, because we need an ecosystem of tens of thousands of innovators and entrepreneurs to be thinking about these problems. And to be funded by the kinds of dollars that are looking for returns that come with really breakthrough solutions, not with incrementalism, not with having the voices of the installed base, which would be like a bad engineering manager talking about sort of sustained innovation, as opposed to true innovation.”
[27:06] CF: “In […] almost every installation we do, we are the lowest cost solution, which should tell you everything you need to know about how big the alternative costs really are in so many places. […] I had that thought […] [of looking at the] GDP PPP per hour, […] gross domestic product purchasing power parity per hour. […] In India, it's about $3.40 an hour. And the average distance walked is about 5 kilometers for water. And then you can look at the average rate of walking while carrying something, it’s about 3.5 kilometers per hour. […] Then you say, how much can a reasonable girl or a woman carry? And so that turns out to be about 60 or 70 cents a liter direct cost to the economy associated with walking for water rather than doing something else. Because the way that the GDP PPP per hour works is, what's the value to the economy of a human per hour? […] So already, that's quite insane. Keep in mind that the global average price of bottled water is 55 cents a liter. That includes all the places where bottled water is very cheap. So it's far more expensive than that in India for a woman or girl to walk for water today.”
[28:48] CF: “Now, you go to the micro. In India, […] what is the cost of a diarrheal case, non hospitalized and then hospitalized? […] What's the average number of diarrheal cases per year that are non hospitalized and are hospitalized? […] It's about $150 a year or something like that? […] So then you go and you back out, how much does that correspond to the cost of their drinking water, which is the thing that most likely gave them diarrhea in the first place? That's something like 30 or 40 cents a liter to drink parasitic water, that gives you diarrhea […]. So when you start looking at that alternative cost, and you can cut it 10 more ways, […] like what is the cost of a girl not getting educated? What is the cost of her lack of self actualization? […] It turns out […] the real cost of crappy water is embarrassingly high.”
Rating: 💧💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 38 min | 🗓️ 01/20/2022
✅ Time saved: 36 min
Additional Links:
Water Foundry
