Skywater is a line of atmospheric water generators — machines that condense potable water out of humidity in the surrounding air — sold for household, commercial, community, and emergency-relief use, with thousands of units deployed worldwide over more than a decade.
The machines run a patented adiabatic distillation process: refrigeration holds a dew point inside a condensation chamber, water vapour condenses to liquid without net heat gain or loss, and the output is filtered and ozone-treated before storage. Yield scales with heat and humidity, which means the technology performs best in precisely the tropical and coastal regions where reliable potable supply is scarcest. Against the alternatives it needs no coastline, unlike desalination, and no rainfall, unlike catchment — but it is energy-hungry, and energy is the binding constraint on every deployment. That constraint is what the Skysource/Skywater Alliance, formed by architect David Hertz and inventor Rich Groden, set out to solve: their WEDEW system paired a Skywater generator with biomass gasification so the process ran entirely on renewable input, producing more than 2,000 litres a day at under two cents a litre. It won the $1.5 million Water Abundance 📝XPRIZE in 2018, beating 97 other teams from 27 countries.