After a little more than eight months of operation, a pilot plant that uses solar energy to distill contaminated groundwater in the parched farmlands of California's Central Valley has performed so well that at least one expert is seeing a new gold rush on the way.
"We are actually sitting on a wealth of groundwater that just needs treatment," says Dennis Falaschi, manager of the Panoche Water District in the Central Valley. Panoche is host of the state-funded pilot project. "It is a really good treatment process. You are using natural solar energy to treat water."