Because water covers 71 percent of the earth’s surface, it may initially seem that it is abundantly available worldwide. This is not the case, however, since more than 97 percent of the earth’s water is undrinkable seawater. As a result, countries such as  Singapore, use desalination plants to produce drinking water. The plants that have been employed to date either heat the water to cause it to evaporate in a process that consumes large amounts of energy of about ten kilowatt-hours (kWh) per cubic meter, or they use a reverse osmosis process that consumes around three KWh per cubic meter by pushing the water through a filter. To reduce this high rate of energy consumption, the government of Singapore created a research network and established the so-called Water Hub. Here, the Siemens research team developed the concept for the energy-saving desalination technology that removes salt from seawater by means of an electric field. The new process consumes only 1.5 kWh per cubic meter and reduces the costs correspondingly.