Starting now, SaltyCells donates $2 from every battery sold to GivePower, a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit that builds solar powered desalination systems called Solar Water Farms. Each farm can turn seawater or brackish groundwater into up to 75,000 litres of clean drinking water a day, enough for around 30,000 people, using nothing but sunlight and battery storage. Buying a SaltyCells battery for your car now also helps fund that work, at no extra cost to you.
When we started SaltyCells, the goal was simple: build a better car battery for Australian conditions and sell it directly, without the markup and the middlemen. That part of the business is not changing. What is changing is what happens to a small piece of every sale.
From today, SaltyCells will donate $2 from every battery sold to GivePower, an American nonprofit that has spent more than a decade solving one of the hardest problems in the developing world: getting clean water out of the ocean or the ground and into people's hands, using solar power instead of diesel generators or a connection to a grid that often does not reach that far. We make batteries that store solar energy for cars. GivePower builds systems that store solar energy to make water. It is a closer fit than it might first look, and it gives every SaltyCells customer a way to put a little bit of sodium-ion energy storage to work somewhere it is genuinely scarce.
Who GivePower Is and Why We Picked Them
GivePower is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, founded in 2014 by Hayes Barnard, who was an executive at SolarCity at the time and now runs the solar financing company GoodLeap. Its mission, in its own words, is to use solar energy to power life's basic necessities for communities who need it most. GivePower runs two main programs: solar microgrids that have electrified more than 2,500 schools and health clinics across 17 countries, and the Solar Water Farm program, which is the part we are backing directly.
We looked at a few options before settling on GivePower. Most solar charities we found were either electrification only, with no clean water angle, or water charities with no renewable energy component at all. GivePower was the one organisation we found doing both at once, which felt like the right match for a company built entirely on the idea that a battery is just a way of saving energy for when you actually need it.
How a GivePower Solar Water Farm Actually Works
A Solar Water Farm is built around reverse osmosis desalination, the same basic process used in large scale desalination plants, just scaled down into a self contained unit that runs entirely off solar panels and battery storage rather than the grid.
Here is the short version of how one operates: water is drawn from a borehole or a beach well rather than directly from the open ocean, so the ground itself acts as a first stage filter before the water even reaches the equipment. The system pushes that water through a semipermeable membrane under pressure, which strips out dissolved salt, bacteria, viruses and other contaminants, leaving drinking water behind. The leftover concentrated brine is either returned to the ocean through a dispersing pipeline at coastal sites, or sent to a wastewater facility or injection well at inland sites. Most farms run with no added chemicals at all.
The whole system, panels, batteries, inverters, the borehole, storage tanks and the treatment and distribution equipment, is housed in a standard shipping container, which makes it possible to deploy a working water plant to a remote coastline or an inland village without building permanent infrastructure first.
GivePower's first Solar Water Farm went into Kiunga, Kenya in 2018. Since then the organisation has deployed further farms, including sites in Likoni near Mombasa and on La Gonâve island in Haiti, each one capable of producing up to 75,000 litres of drinking water a day, enough for a community of around 30,000 people.
GivePower's Impact So Far
| Metric | Figure (self reported by GivePower) |
|---|---|
| Nonprofit status | Registered 501(c)(3), EIN 47-1265705 |
| Founded | 2014, by Hayes Barnard |
| Countries reached | 17, across Africa, Asia and Latin America |
| Schools and clinics electrified | More than 2,500 |
| Solar Water Farm capacity | Up to 75,000 litres per day, per farm |
| People served per farm | Approximately 30,000 |
| Cumulative water delivered | More than 550 million litres to date |
| People impacted | More than 2 million, according to GivePower |
Those last two figures come directly from GivePower's own reporting rather than an independent audit, and like any charity's self published impact numbers, they are worth treating as the organisation's own account rather than a verified external figure. We are comfortable with that because the underlying technology and the published case studies, including the Kenya and Haiti deployments, are well documented and consistent with what solar desalination of this kind is capable of.
Why SaltyCells Is Donating $2 From Every Battery
We built this business on the idea that sodium-ion chemistry is a smarter way to store energy than the lead acid batteries most Australian cars still run. Lead acid batteries fail predictably, pollute if they are not recycled properly, and need replacing every three to four years. A sodium-ion battery does the same job for longer, with a smaller environmental footprint over its life.
GivePower is doing the same kind of thinking at a much bigger scale: using solar energy and smart storage to replace a dirtier, less reliable alternative, in this case diesel powered desalination or no clean water access at all. Supporting that work with $2 from every battery sold is a way of putting our own values into practice beyond our own product line, without changing a single price on the site. The donation comes out of our margin, not out of what you pay.
What $2 From Every Battery Actually Does
We are not going to pretend we can tell you exactly how many litres of water your particular battery purchase funds. GivePower does not publish a per dollar water yield, and anyone who tells you precisely how far $2 stretches on the ground in Kenya or Haiti is guessing. What we can tell you is where the money goes: toward the solar panels, membranes, pumps, batteries and ongoing maintenance that keep existing Solar Water Farms running and help fund new ones in communities that do not have reliable access to clean water today.
🔋 Every Battery Now Carries the $2 GivePower Donation
Every SaltyCells battery you buy, whether it is the SC-NA1260 for a passenger car, the SC-NA1270-280 for an SUV, or the SC-NA1280 for a 4WD or ute, now carries that $2 contribution automatically. There is nothing extra to opt into and no separate checkout step. If you already own a SaltyCells battery, your purchase has already counted.
Shop the SaltyCells Range →How to Be Part of It
If you are due for a battery replacement, buying from the SaltyCells shop now does two things at once: it gets you a five year warranty sodium-ion battery that will outlast the lead acid unit currently under your bonnet, and it puts $2 toward a nonprofit building solar powered water infrastructure in places that need it far more than any of us do. You can read more about why we back sodium-ion chemistry in the first place on our why sodium-ion page, and see the full details of the pledge on our Giving Pledge page.
Frequently Asked Questions
It is included. SaltyCells prices have not changed. The $2 donation comes out of our own margin on every battery sold, not from an added fee at checkout.
Yes. GivePower is a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit in the United States, founded in 2014 by Hayes Barnard. It has run solar electrification and Solar Water Farm projects across 17 countries and is well documented in independent coverage of its Kenya and Haiti desalination projects.
Every battery in the SaltyCells range, across every SKU, contributes the same $2 donation. It is not limited to a particular model or price point.
SaltyCells tracks sales and remits the donation total to GivePower directly, at least every quarter. We publish a running update on our Giving Pledge page as the partnership continues.
Clean water and energy access go hand in hand, and GivePower's Solar Water Farms are a direct extension of the same solar and battery storage technology SaltyCells is built around, just applied to water instead of a car's electrical system. It felt like the most natural fit for who we are rather than a cause picked for its own sake.
Conclusion
SaltyCells has always been about proving that sodium-ion batteries are a better fit for Australian conditions than the lead acid batteries most of us grew up replacing every few years. Partnering with GivePower lets that same belief in smarter energy storage do some good well beyond our own driveways. From today, every battery you buy from the SaltyCells shop puts $2 toward a Solar Water Farm turning sunlight and seawater into something people cannot live without. The battery still does its job in your car exactly the same way. It just does a bit more good on the way out the door.