About — Watts on Water

Our Mission

Accelerate the adoption and implementation of water-based solar technologies to provide clean, abundant, low impact water and energy for all.

Watts on Water was founded in 2023 by Matt Datlen and Kurt Rustin, both experienced engineers looking to put their passion for innovation to work against the worst effects of climate change. With worsening drought conditions, increasing energy demands, and extensive land losses from ground mounted solar it was clear that AquaPV technology is a better solution and it needs more hands and minds working to develop unique solutions to scalability. From this, Watts on Water was born, and Kurt and Matt got together with their most trusted colleagues and developed a mission and a method.

UN 17 Goals we are working to address:

Primary Mission:

Create Energy/Land/Water Security in the U.S. with one technology!

Energy Problem:

The United States, as of 2023, receives just over 20% of its energy from renewable energy, the U.S. government has set a net zero emission target of 2050, and predict that >50% of our energy will come from solar. This is a necessary but massive undertaking, and achieving this goal poses some difficult challenges, not least of which will be land allocation.

Land Problem:

To reach net zero with ~50% of our energy coming from solar nearly 10 million acres of area will be needed, and right now that area is coming from agriculture or nature. The current approach to ground mounted solar is missing the mark on land use:

Single use land.
Environmental degradation
Long distance interconnection development (expensive, Power losses, project delays)
Costs and impacts of building new access roads for transportation to new use areas.
>20B gals/year of water is used to clean our panels today, and it usually ends up on the ground.

AquaPV takes no land to develop, and there is enough eligible water to supply more than 25% of the national energy demand.

Water Problem:

Many regions in the U.S. have been hit with crippling drought in recent years, and those droughts will get worse as our climate does, some states have even cut water use across the board by at least 25%. To ensure water resiliency we need to reduce our water losses, one of the biggest being evaporation, we lose about as much water to evaporation as we actually use, especially in the Colorado river basin.

The Solution:

There is a vast amount of area available in our nation that has already been developed for water infrastructure, such as conveyance and storage, and in many areas that water is already in dual use with hydro power production. By targeting artificial canals and reservoirs that have close proximity to key infrastructure, for AquaPV development we can build a significant portion of the nation’s energy targets while putting a stopper in evaporation and land loss. The full list of co-benefits:

Avoid up to ~10 millon acres of looming land loss.
Near zero land acquisition and development costs.
Reduce evaporation up to 85%, saving up to 20m gal/acre covered each year.
Make use of existing electrical infrastructure and access roads.
Increase efficiency of the solar panels from water cooling effects, up to 13.5%.
Panel cleaning can utilize and recycle the same water it sits on, avoiding the high water footprint of ground mounted solar.
Stop algae overgrowth, which costs millions each year to clean from water management systems.
Help support demand for a growing electric charging network in remote locations.
Reduce irrigation pumping costs on farms by up to 66%, while directly relacing diesel generators.
Others

Secondary Mission:

While rolling out our technology in the United States, with a focus on the Colorado River Basin states is our current primary mission, we have every intention of providing our end-to-end development services internationally, there are countless regions around the world facing severe drought, and lack of energy, aquaPV is ideal for those regions, especially when they rely on their land for their economy.

Bring affordable energy and water resiliency to underserved nations