Researchers at MIT say they’ve found a simple, highly efficient way to capture the water in fog and its industrial cousin, the plumes of moisture that escape from the cooling towers of power plants.

The discovery raises the prospect that the plants could save millions of dollars, the researchers said.

And if the technology is used at plants that use seawater for cooling, it could also provide a source of fresh water for communities that might otherwise need to build costly desalination plants, the researchers said.

“This can be a great solution to address the global water crisis,’’ professor Kripa Varanasi said in an MIT statement.

Varanasi estimated that 1 trillion gallons of water a year are lost to the air by power plant cooling towers worldwide. He said in a telephone interview that his new technology, which will be tested in a pilot installation at MIT, could recapture a sizable chunk of that water.

The research, coauthored by Varanasi and Maher Damak, who received his doctorate from MIT last year, is being published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

The system targets fog, water droplets about 10 microns in size that are suspended in air. Fog is produced both naturally and by cooling towers.

The system builds on the idea of fog harvesting, which is used in some coastal regions. In such operations, fog nets of plastic or metal mesh are strung up by the ocean, catching 1 to 3 percent of the droplets that pass through them, MIT said.

Researchers found that the vast majority of the water droplets were simply streaming around the mesh. “They basically follow the wind stream lines,’’ Varanasi said. “Getting the drops to the mesh was the key thing.’’

Researchers searched for a way to increase the efficiency of water collection. They found that when fog is zapped by a beam of ions, in this case ionized air, the water droplets are attracted to the mesh, where they can be collected. Varanasi said the system is 99 percent efficient at catching fog droplets.

The system is the basis for a startup company called Infinite Cooling, MIT said.

Varanasi said a typical 600-megawatt power plant consumes as much water annually as a city of 100,000 people, losing 750 million gallons to the air, 20 to 30 percent of which would be fog droplets.

Varanasi envisions his system capturing 150 million gallons from the hypothetical plant. Varanasi didn’t go into the details of what the system installation and operation would cost but said it would need just $10,000 in electricity to run.

The captured water would be pure, distilled water and could be piped to a city’s water system or it could be used in the power plant’s boilers, which, unlike the cooling system, require clean water. He said the captured water could provide a $1 million boost to the plant’s bottom line.

Varanasi, who said he sees himself as both a scientist and an entrepreneur, said the system could also be used to harvest natural fog but that would be a smaller business than working with power plants. He also said he saw potential for working with data centers, which also emit plumes of moisture from cooling towers.

Martin Finucane can be reached at martin.finucane@globe.com.