In a quiet corner of Laborie, inside a workshop that looks part laboratory, part machine room, Karlis Noel spends his days building things most people in Saint Lucia have never seen before.
There are sensors, navigation devices, growing systems and prototypes in various stages of completion. To Noel, this is normal. This is where he thinks, experiments and solves problems.
“From the time I know myself, I always had something that looks like a lab,” Noel said, recalling a childhood spent reading his father’s physics books and playing with old equipment from the power station where his father worked.
Over the years, that curiosity turned into real-world inventions. Noel, a fisherman who did not complete secondary school, would eventually go on to build the Eastern Caribbean’s first solar-powered mobile desalination plant, a system capable of turning seawater into drinking water.
That innovation led to opportunities beyond Saint Lucia.
“The technology went to the Pacific, to an island called Nauru, and then we got a call from Africa… Tanzania,” he said.
In places like Tanzania, Noel applied his skills to real problems, such as designing a system to filter fluoride-contaminated groundwater at a local school. While his desalination work established his reputation, Noel soon shifted his focus to another urgent Caribbean need: its own environmental data.
Standing near one of his newer devices, an unmanned surface vessel (USV) designed to collect ocean data, Noel explained that climate change and unstable weather pushed him in that direction.
“We should not be in a position to get any surprises from nature. We can monitor nature and do accurate predictions on nature, what it’s doing, just like our body,” he said.
The unmanned vessel can remain at sea for months, collecting data on ocean conditions and weather patterns. He has also installed a MetOcean buoy and weather sensors just outside his lab. Together, the systems are part of a bigger idea: a Saint Lucian-owned environmental monitoring network.
“We depend on Martinique and Barbados for weather information… Why don’t we have our own systems?” Noel said.
The project has already gained international attention. Noel and his team were shortlisted from more than 1 500 applicants worldwide and won funding for their unmanned vessels through an international competition in Dubai focused on the blue economy.
But despite the awards, the travel and the international recognition, Noel still measures success in simple terms.
“Making money is not success… What makes you happy, making a difference, that is success,” he said.
And making a difference, especially in small island communities like his own, has always been the goal.
This focus naturally leads back to the question of water.
Searching for water in a land surrounded by water
Saint Lucia is in the middle of a water crisis, according to officials. Communities are facing shortages and now hotels are considering barging in water from neighbouring islands, raising fresh concerns about the country’s long-term water security.
As the country now searches for solutions, the self-taught inventor says he is “confused” by how Saint Lucia found itself in this situation.
His confusion, he explained, is not because the problem is too difficult to solve, but because solutions already exist, including systems he built nearly twenty years ago that could have helped the country.
“Why are we crying when we have access to the technology?” he asked.
For years, desalination has been criticised for being unduly energy-intensive, too expensive, and harmful to the marine environment due to brine waste. Noel said those were the very problems he set out to solve when he built his system.
“So my desalinators have no brine. The brine gets neutralised in the system itself. So that solves the environmental impact problem,” he said.
His systems were also designed to run on solar power and included energy recovery technology to reduce electricity consumption.
Still, Noel believes Saint Lucia may be tackling the issue the wrong way. Rather than relying on a single large desalination plant, he suggests deploying smaller, modular units around the island to support the existing water system during outages or droughts.
“We’re not going to replace WASCO. What we need is a backup, something to complement the existing system,” he said.
He compares it to backup generators or redundancy systems used in power generation and other critical infrastructure.
Noel estimates that a 10 000-gallon-per-day desalination unit could cost in the region of US$500 000, which he argues is a small price when compared to the national impact of water shortages.
“That is nothing for human life. That’s water you’re talking about. People cannot work without water. You cannot do anything without water,” he said.
For him, the issue is not just technology. It is planning, priorities and funding of research and development (R&D).
“We need to invest more in R&D… And put our priorities right. And stop going around in circles. We need to keep moving forward,” Noel said.
Both desalination systems he developed remain in use by the nations for which they were built. Noel says he hopes that Saint Lucia will come to see water security not as a crisis response, but as a priority where local ideas and innovation will play a central role.
