Its US$1.75 million Water Abundance Prize aims to inspire ideas that can draw water from the atmosphere, and it has just announced its five finalists.

The criteria for the Water Abundance Prize tasks competing teams with developing technologies that can harvest 2,000 liters (528 gal) of water from the atmosphere each day, using only renewable energy at a cost of no more than two centers per liter (0.26 gal).

The competition drew submissions from 98 teams hailing from 25 countries, and has now been whittled down to five entrants based on their technical documents, early test results and video evidence of a working prototype. They now have five months to continue building their devices for the final round of testing.