Waves to Water Prize – Access Cities

The Innovative Market Strategies Program

Incubator Opportunity: IMPEL+ Building Technologies to Market

16/11/2020

City:	New York.
Challenge Title:	Waves to Water Prize.
Challenge Owner:	The U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office.
Challenge Website:	https://www.herox.com/wavestowater
Challenge Award:	The prize has five stags, aimed to support concepts through demonstration, with the final stage culminating in an open water testing competition at Jenette’s Pier, where the systems will produce clean water using the power of waves. The five stages of this prize will distribute a total of $3.3 million and will provide access to testing and demonstrating solutions out in the ocean in final DRINK Stage.
Theme/Sector:	Urban Water.
Challenge Blurb:	The U.S. Department of Energy Water Power Technologies Office challenges innovators to submit your ideas to develop wave powered desalination systems for the Waves to Water Prize. The Waves to Water Prize is a 5-Stage, $3.3M contest to accelerate the development of small, modular, wave-powered desalination systems capable of providing potable drinking water in disaster relief scenarios and remote coastal locations.
Challenge Description:	The prize supports the integration of existing and novel wave energy generation technologies with water technologies that can deliver effective, consistent, durable and low-maintenance water delivery systems. The prize seeks to identify the ideal scale of wave energy innovation paired with water technologies that can serve niche markets such as disaster response, and advance the state of both wave energy devices and desalination technologies that could provide value in other markets as the technologies mature. Watch the Waves to Water Prize Location reveal HERE.
Prize Goals:	The purpose of this prize is to incentivize the creation of wave powered desalination systems that meet the following goals: • Flexibility in Varied Wave Conditions: Competitors must develop systems that can survive harsh wave conditions and operate under different wave conditions and different sites without major tuning to ensure operation at a wide variety of locations. All solutions that make it to the DRINK Stage will be evaluated at an open-water test site with an anticipated average- to low-energetic wave resources. • Easily Deployed: Systems must be able to be deployed in less than 48 hours, addressing the ability to deploy quickly and easily in a disaster response scenario where there is large uncertainty around site conditions. • Ship in a Standard Container: Technologies must fit into a predefined container – approximately 45 x 48 x 42 inches – to standardize the shipping constraints that face many disaster response and recovery scenarios. • Deliver Minimum Water Quality: The maximum total dissolved solids (TDS) for this competition is 1,000 mg/L. At the DRINK Stage, competitors will be scored higher if this threshold is exceeded and the water quality is closer to a target goal range of 300 – 600 TDS mg/L. • Operate without Environmental Degradation: Brine discharge, or other salt concentration issues from the process of desalinating water will need to be managed without creating environmental issues.
Deadline for Submissions:	November 30th, 2020 11 p.m. (CET)
Registration Details:	Register for the challenge HERE.
Further Details:	For further information, please contact Danish Cleantech Hub New York or Mille Munksgaard, Project Manager, at mimu@di.dk.