Why We Invested in SOURCE Global: The solar opportunity for drinking water

By Brian Walsh, Head of Wind Ventures

Global freshwater demand has increased significantly over the centuries, driven by three primary influences. The first is population growth, which has grown 4x since 1910. Second is an increase in excessive use where freshwater use per capita has increased 3x. Third is leakage: as much as 30% of global freshwater is lost due to leaks.

On its own, this might seem fine, but it is important to understand that freshwater is a finite resource. So, as demand grows, the stress on the world’s supply increases. According to McKinsey&Company, global freshwater supply will only meet 70% of demand by 2030. This means that many of the world’s surface and groundwater resources will become so stressed that they will cease to exist.

Further accelerating this freshwater crisis are many countries that remain unrestrained in their freshwater usage (India, for example, for agriculture). Additionally, due to climate change, rising sea levels are absorbing freshwater supplies, accelerating droughts, and shrinking glaciers — an important source of freshwater.

This is certainly a pending crisis as much of the world’s economy from agriculture and industry depends on freshwater. Even more immediate and concerning, however, is the crisis this creates for a basic human right — drinking water. Drinking water is freshwater that can be safely used in drink or food preparation. There simply isn’t much of it that is accessible on Earth. As a percentage of global water, 97.5% is salt water and only 2.5% is fresh water. Drinkable water constitutes only 1.2% but this includes inaccessible sources such as frozen glaciers. Accessible global drinking water is only <0.4% of all water on Earth and it is a requirement for life.

As a result, all countries (developed or developing) face challenges providing access to this basic human right while also protecting it from contamination and making it affordable for everyone. There are several existing solutions that aim to help provide safe, reliable drinking water. These include trucked water, piped (as we do here in most of the US), gathered, bottled and desalination (converting seawater into drinking water). All of these solutions have major challenges from reliability, very high costs of trucking, high costs of maintenance for piped water and significant power needs for desalination, which also produces a harmful waste stream of salts and contaminants.

This is why we are so excited about SOURCE — a quickly maturing startup with a novel technology that produces high-quality drinking water completely off-grid and via distributed panels. In essence, the SOURCE panels produce drinking water from just the sun and air where there is nearly an endless, always replenishing supply. Within the air, there is actually six times the water contained in Earth’s rivers and streams. This has largely been known for a long time, but it is technically very difficult to do.

SOURCE has made significant progress over the years in harnessing this drinking water resource efficiently and cost-effectively. While there are other teams working toward the same noble aspiration, SOURCE is quite unique in its ability to do it using only the sun and air and to work even in low humidity regions. Other solutions need to be plugged into an electrical socket and require higher humidity levels to work, so they can only pursue rather narrow use cases.

In contrast, SOURCE is already global, serving many different sectors and use cases, from remote villages to residential areas and even reusable bottled water in Wholefoods.

WIND Ventures is excited to support SOURCE and flex its muscle in offering the company unfair access to the Latin American markets for growth acceleration and meaningful impact.

###

About Brian Walsh

Brian Walsh leads WIND Ventures in San Francisco — the strategic venture capital group for Copec, which is a leading energy and retail corporation throughout Latin America and the United States. Brian has two decades of venture capital experience in the San Francisco Bay Area, both in private and strategic venture capital. Most recently, Brian was an Associate Partner and Senior Expert at McKinsey&Company where he led the Firm’s corporate venturing advisory efforts with global Fortune 500 CEO clients. Brian holds an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a BS in Physics from Tufts University.

About WIND Ventures

Based in San Francisco, WIND Ventures is the strategic venture capital (CVC) arm of Copec, one of the leading energy companies in Central and South America and one of the most valued brands throughout Latin America. WIND Ventures leverages Copec’s significant resources to accelerate growth, primarily within Latin America, for startups and scaleups across the world within the new mobility, energy and retail sectors. Visit windventures.vc or follow us on Linkedin and Twitter.