Maher Damak

Catching the water everyone wrote off

Stand next to a power-plant cooling tower and you will see a fat white plume rising off the top. Most engineers call that steam and move on. Damak looked at the same plume and saw a leak - millions of gallons a year of treated water evaporating straight into the sky. Infinite Cooling exists to catch it.

The method sounds like a magic trick and is really just clean physics. A beam of charged particles gives each tiny droplet in the plume a slight electric charge. A wire mesh, charged the opposite way, then pulls the droplets out of the air the way a balloon pulls hair after you rub it on a sweater. The recovered water drips down, collected. In tests on MIT's own nuclear research reactor, that water came out more than 100 times purer than the water circulating through the plant - cleaner going out than it was coming in.

For a typical power plant that adds up to roughly a million dollars a year in water savings and up to 20 percent less water drawn from the environment. Damak leads the whole operation as CEO: strategy, partnerships, the physics, the sales conversations. He is the rare founder who can derive the equation on the whiteboard and then go close the deal that puts it on a 900-megawatt plant.

The company did not stop at hardware. Once its systems were on real cooling towers, Damak's team noticed something odd: the operators running these massive machines often had almost no real-time data on how well they were working. So Infinite Cooling built TowerPulse, an analytics layer that gives cooling towers something they never had - eyes.