This article in The Conversation gives a useful update about the water crises affecting people in the Caribbean Islands. The Water-from-Air Greenhouse Project was very active a bit over twenty years ago. The Viability Study reports produced for the Canadian International Development Agency were second-to-none. In my opinion they remain a valuable collection of knowledge about how to establish a commercial water-from-air irrigated greenhouse on a small tropical island. Sadly, the necessary level of interest and funding never materialized so not even a pilot installation was built. Inertia from so many angles stifles innovation! In the proverbial alternate universe there would now be several WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ installations to help alleviate the water crises discussed in the article.

This interesting article in EOS, published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), has insights about the development and deployment of OTEC that are likely to apply also to water-producing greenhouse technologies.

A recent article about Seawater Air-Conditioning (SWAC) contains knowledge applicable to the design of the WaterProducer-Greenhouse™.

The citation for the article is:
Hunt, J.D., Zakeri, B., Nascimento, A. et al. High velocity seawater air-conditioning with thermal energy storage and its operation with intermittent renewable energies. Energy Efficiency 13, 1825–1840 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12053-020-09905-0

Clicking on this line will take you to the full text of this open source article. 

Apparently, I should not be so frustrated that the WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ project has not yet built its first installation! New technologies have often taken about two decades to become mainstream. Steven Johnson gave several examples in his interesting book (published 2010) titled, Where good ideas come from: the natural history of innovation. It takes typically about ten years to construct the "platform" and another ten years for widespread adoption (the 10/10 rule).

I am experiencing this (agonizingly) with the WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ Project. The two year viability study, completed in 2003 resulted in a unique knowledge base (the reports to CIDA) that could be marketed to interested people. Lots of mild interest. Many hours are spent on personal networking and development of this information-rich website. Now, more than ten self-funded years later, I am hopeful that there exist some early adopters with the imagination and guts to exploit this innovative technically and commercially viable platform (along with our team's expertise) for improving water and food security for the people living on and visiting tropical small islands. Water-scarcity remains one of the global "key societal challenges" reminds an editorial in the January 2, 2014 issue of Nature. In the same issue, Colin Macilwain listed examples of mounting societal problems in this order: water, food, health, energy, and climate change. The WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ addresses the first two problems.

Our online store is now selling complete sets of the printed and bound reports our Grand Turk water-from-air greenhouse project produced for CIDA. These peer-reviewed documents are an invaluable knowledge base about a practical method of improving water security and food security for the people living on and visiting small tropical islands.

The Turks and Caicos Islands Government has contracted with a joint venture of Matrix Enviro, Ltd. and Aqua-Chem, Inc. to build a new 300,000 US gallons per day reverse osmosis plant on Grand Turk. More information is available at:

• Aqua-Chem, Inc. Awarded 4th Contract...

• New Grand Turk water plant doubles water capacity

Will this development affect the viability of the Grand Turk Water-Producer-Greenhouse™ Project? Probably not, for the following reasons:

• Although reverse-osmosis (RO) product water is potable, our CIDA project studies found it was not favoured by consumers—bottled water imported from Florida or locally produced was in high demand;

• Water produced by our project would have minor or no salt content because it would be produced by condensing water vapour from the air;
• Our product water could be used directly by beverage and food manufacturers without undergoing further treatment. We discovered a local water bottler had to run the RO water through additional RO cycles to produce an acceptable product; and
  
• Our project uniquely integrates 50,000 US gallons per day water production and hydroponic horticulture for producing commercial quantities of fresh vegetables and fruits

Roland Wahlgren, BSc MA, is a Physical Geographer and owner/President of Canadian Dew Technologies Inc. (CDTI, www.candew.ca). He has researched water-from-air technologies since 1984. Peer-reviewed publications in the water-from-air field include Atmospheric Water Vapour Processing, Waterlines, Practical Action Publishing (1993); Atmospheric Water Vapour Processor Designs for Potable Water Production: A Review, Water Research, Elsevier Science Ltd. (2001); and Water-Producing Greenhouses for Small Tropical Islands: Ahead of Their Time or a Timely Solution?, Acta Hort. 797, ISHS 2008, (2008). CDTI, founded in 2003, has performed research and development work for client companies interested in commercializing water-from-air technologies. The R & D work included building prototypes of 20 L per day and 2500 L per day machines. The 2500 L per day machines were commercialized. CDTI commissioned, on behalf of its client, two 2500 L per day machines in Belize City in 2006. As Principal of Atmoswater Research (www.atmoswater.com; founded 1997), Roland Wahlgren was the scientific/technical consultant to the CIDA-supported Grand Turk Water-producing Greenhouse Viability Study from 2001 to 2003. He performed the role of project manager for the CIDA project. He has persisted in fund-raising efforts and maintained the project website for several years. He completed recently a major revision of the website.

With successful drilling of a test borehole, proving technical feasibility, we expect financing will become easier to obtain. Financing would allow a full-scale commercial operation to commence as a demonstration project on Grand Turk. Beneficiaries would include the people of TCI who would achieve improved food and drinking water security with accompanying health improvements. Our first commercial operation will demonstrate how a WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ acts like a socio-economic engine, stimulating the regional economy, much as would a new resort, hotel, railway, or cruise ship dock. We expect widespread interest to develop through our marketing activities, thereby making it possible to replicate the project on other islands in TCI and on other tropical small islands worldwide (see list of viable locations in the following excerpt from CDTI’s Technical Bulletin No. 3).

A water-from-air production system improves local access to fresh water without the negative effects of existing approaches: depleting scarce surface or groundwater freshwater supplies or producing brine by-products and chemical pollution as does desalination (flash distillation or reverse osmosis). The WaterProducing-Greenhouse™ system, in common with other drinking-water-from-air systems, has relatively low environmental impact. Read about the details in our Technical Bulletins:

• Technical Bulletin No. 1—WaterProducer-Greenhouse™ and Reverse Osmosis Desalination Compared

• Technical Bulletin No. 5—Environmental impact of widespread use of drinking-water-from-air systems

A specific issue facing the 3,700 people living on the island of Grand Turk in the Turks and Caicos Islands is that access to drinking water is inconsistent and fresh water shortages are common. The relatively small consumer and industrial base on the island and its isolated location creates access and importation challenges, making fresh water and fresh produce expensive. Most goods are imported first via the more heavily populated island of Providenciales. In fact, the population of Grand Turk is dependent on imported fresh produce and bottled drinking water to a degree that makes the population vulnerable to health risks when transportation links are broken during natural or human-caused disasters. Our specific objective is to build, on Grand Turk, a water-producing greenhouse system that obtains fresh water from the ambient moist tropical air to provide irrigation water for a commercial greenhouse operation growing food crops and yields surplus water for drinking water bottling. The design of the system provides a relatively cool growing area so that temperate climate food crops grow at sea level in a tropical climate. Immediate beneficiaries of the project are the people of Grand Turk who will enjoy improved food and water security with attendant health benefits such as better nutrition. Our greenhouse system would benefit local employment. Wider benefits from the greenhouse, encompassing the entire TCI, will be much-needed economic diversification, new jobs in other businesses that interact with the greenhouse operation, and introduction of new skills and technologies.