663 million people worldwide still use unimproved drinking water sources, including unprotected wells and springs, and surface water. The majority of this population lives in the two developing regions in countries of sub-Saharan Africa and Southern Asian.

Unimproved or contaminated water can transmit diseases and, in many cases, is the reason of thousands of deaths mostly of children younger than five years old.

Off-grid zero emission electricity generation systems represent an innovative solution in rural and isolated regions.

With the progression of desertification, a growing demand for off-grid water treatment plants is expected during the next decades.

The Project:

With the support of DEG, Ferntech and Membran-Filtrations-Technik (mft) have developed a renewable energy powered, remotely controllable micro-reverse osmosis water desalination plant: The RO-SEA 100.

The drinking water produced is sold locally to municipalities or end user, which so far have limited or no access to clean drinking water.

Ferntech provided embedded hardware to monitor the reverse osmosis systems and the off-grid systems as a whole, taking responsibility for context data transfer, the web portal and the long-term data analysis.

The plant is supplied with wind and solar energy, which is stored in lithium-ion batteries. Weather conditions, state-of-charge of the battery etc are monitored and recorded using the Ferntech Controller.

The data is sent via GSM to the Ferntech server so that actionable decisions can be taken in real time by mft back in Cologne.

Controller logic has also been built into the Ferntech device, enabling the unit to switch itself on/off as necessary when certain monitored conditions are exceeded (e.g., state of charge).