By John — Desalination News
Villagers on two remote islands in Tonga’s Vava’u group have reliable access to clean drinking water for the first time, after Dutch technology provider Elemental Water Makers and Australian water-solutions firm Bluemont Pty Ltd completed the installation of solar-powered desalination units on Hunga and Matamaka islands, the companies announced September 29.
The two islands, both without reliable piped freshwater infrastructure, now each host a solar-powered reverse osmosis unit capable of producing 4,300 liters of WHO-standard drinking water a day, for a combined output of 8,600 liters daily across both sites. The systems run entirely on solar power, with no fossil-fuel backup, and are designed for roughly 15 years of service — a lifespan intended to outlast the diesel generators and smaller filtration units that have historically served these kinds of isolated Pacific communities, often unreliably and at high fuel-import cost.
The installations were backed by the Powering Renewable Energy Opportunities (PREO) initiative, a renewable-energy funding program active across the Pacific, and supported on the ground by Pacific Technologies New Zealand and Tonga’s own water utility, the Tonga Water Board (Poate Vai ‘O Tonga). As part of the rollout, ten community members on each island were trained to operate and maintain the systems, including at least five women per island, alongside a representative from the Tonga Water Board — an approach aimed at ensuring the equipment keeps running without requiring outside technicians to fly in for routine upkeep.
“It was life changing for me as well as the villagers who now have a reliable source of clean drinking water for the first time ever,” said Paul Hart, a director at Bluemont, in comments announcing the project’s completion.
The Hunga and Matamaka installations are the latest in a series of Elemental Water Makers projects in Tonga, following earlier solar desalination deployments elsewhere in the kingdom. Tonga, like many low-lying Pacific island nations, faces acute freshwater vulnerability: groundwater supplies are limited and easily contaminated by storm surge or drought-driven saltwater intrusion, while rainwater harvesting — the traditional backup — becomes unreliable during the extended dry spells that climate variability has made more frequent across the region. Small-scale, solar-powered desalination has increasingly been positioned by aid groups and Pacific governments as a practical middle ground between expensive large-scale plants and rainwater systems that fail precisely when they’re needed most.
Bluemont said it is now in discussions about extending the model to 23 additional remote Tongan communities, with potential support from the Asian Development Bank — a scale-up that, if it proceeds, would represent a substantial expansion of solar desalination infrastructure across the kingdom’s outer islands. No funding commitment for that wider rollout has yet been confirmed.
The project adds to a small but growing body of evidence that containerized or portable solar desalination units can be deployed relatively quickly and cheaply in geographically dispersed, low-resource settings where a conventional grid-connected plant would be impractical — a use case distinct from, but complementary to, the large seawater reverse osmosis facilities that dominate desalination investment in the Middle East, Australia and elsewhere.
(Source: PR Newswire) (Source: Vietnam Investment Review)