They almost missed the cut for the final competition round of five, but went on to win.
LOS ANGELES (AP) — It started out modestly enough, reports AP: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one.
Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger — so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance.
They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as much as 528 gallons (2,000 liters) of water a day at a cost of no more than 2 cents a quart (1 liter).
The XPrize competition, created by a group of philanthropists, entrepreneurs and others, has awarded more than $140 million over the years for what it calls audacious futuristic ideas aimed at protecting and improving the planet.
The first XPrize, for $10 million, went to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aviation pioneer Burt Rutan in 2004 for SpaceShipOne, the first privately financed manned space flight.
So when Hertz learned a couple of years ago that a prize was about to be offered to whoever could come up with a cheap, innovative way to produce clean fresh water for a world that doesn’t have enough of it, he decided to go all in.
Continued here.
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
I am intrigued but very very wary of something for nothing technologies. Shades of perpetual motion? Ultimately thermodynamic law prevails.
There is nothing in this report that indicates the principles involved in this equipment. Somewhere energy is required to keep the whole thing going however efficient the process. 2 cents a litre smacks of absurdity. At less than 40% humidity one would be hard put to process the volume of air required.
Heat energy comes from burning organic waste, biomass etc.
“Certainly in regions where you have a lot of biomass this is going to be a very simple technology to deploy,” said Matthew Stuber, a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Connecticut and expert on water systems who was one of the panel’s judges.
He called their water-making machine a “really cool” merging of rather simple technologies…
How the system works
Skysource/Skywater Alliance’s creation is called “WeDew,” which stands for wood-to-energy deployed water system. It’s a combination of two existing devices. The first, Skywater, is a generator that imitates a cloud. Skywater, co-invented by Groden, cools warm air and stores the resulting condensation inside a tank. Water in the shipping container’s tank can then be accessed via a tap or water fountain.
The condensation process requires electricity, so the architects also incorporated a biomass gasifier into their system as a low-cost energy source, as Fast Company reported. Gasifiers can take in organic material and vaporize it to produce a gas mixture of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and carbon monoxide that serves as a fuel.
A gasifier can be filled with various types of biomass, including coconut shells and pieces of pine trees. The vaporization creates heat and humidity, which help the water-gathering device operate efficiently. In addition, the gasifier produces biochar as a byproduct, a carbon-rich substance that can be put in soil to help plants grow.
“It’s a carbon-negative technology,” Hertz told Fast Company.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/device-that-harvests-water-from-air-wins-xprize-2018-10
So let me put this another way. Take a multi-fuel furnace, the heat of which powers a generator which powers a de-humidifier which cools and removes water from the cooled exhaust of the multi-fuel furnace. Net gain of electricity zero. Side benefits water and fertilizer.
Not that I have any problems with this as such. But it is a complicated way of going about collecting common items that can be achieved other ways.
I do this with my dehumidifier.
pochas – your dehumidifier probably won’t run on coconut shells 😐
oldbrew:
But the generator might run on coconut shells if available locally. Less carbon intensive that destroying forests to make wood pellets, shipping them 3,000 miles then railing them to the power station.
Alternately, dig shallow pit in desert sand and add selection of greenery. Place dish top, middle. Cover with plastic film with small amont of san in middle to cause condensed water to drip into dish. Might distill a litre a day (if lucky).
Using biomass is a problem if there’s not a continuous supply that counts as waste.
Presumably, they didn’t think that solar power was reliable enough to match their needs.
This sounds very nice but I can see a couple of problems.
First, how long has a production unit run without failures and what is the measured output?
Second, the biomass problem. If you have coconut shells then water isn’t generally a problem but if it is intended for use in scrubland where any biomass is at a premium, what do they use, animal dung? In other words how much water do they get per denuded square kilometre of scrub?
Another good idea that works under controlled conditions bur will most probably fail in real world conditions.