Bridging the Gap Between Solar Power and Desalination

Meetings
Written By Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley

MEETING FOR THE WEEK OF July 14, 2025

This Meeting at a Glance:

Program: Bridging the Gap Between Solar Power and Desalination

Speaker: Jon Bessette

Is this your first time visiting us? If so, welcome to our weekly online meeting! To complete our meeting, please continue reading from here to the bottom of this page. Each Monday, our week’s meeting is posted early in the morning, U.S. Pacific Time. These meetings are designed so that you can read and watch what we post anytime during the week. The entire meeting takes about 60 minutes to complete, with the video conference recording of the program being the bulk of the time. Note that you can easily read this meeting with your favorite device, so feel free to take our meeting on the go with you. Please also complete the attendance form at the bottom and leave a comment. Enjoy!

To properly attend this meeting, please:

  1. Read and watch the content below in its entirety.

  2. Complete the attendance survey.

Everyone is encouraged to leave a comment in the Disqus section at the bottom of the page.

Greetings Members, Rotarians, Friends and Guests:

Want to Learn More About Us? - Who We Are, What We Do, Why We Do It

Want to become a Rotarian? - Join us in helping to make the world a better place!

Thanks for joining our weekly meeting!

PP Nick LeGarde

WEEKLY FUNNY WITH SHAGS

We believe laughter is an important part of life, and we should all make time to laugh a little. This segment of our meeting is meant to tickle you just enough. These funnies are curated by member Steven "Shags" Shagrin!

The Importance of Physics

A college physics professor was explaining a particularly complicated concept to his class when a pre-med student interrupted him. “Why do we have to learn this stuff?” one young man blurted out.

“To save lives,” the professor responded.

A few minutes later the student spoke up again. “So how does physics save lives?”

The professor stared at the student for a long time without saying a word. Finally, the professor continued, “Physics saves lives because it keeps certain people out of medical school.”

Inspiration

As you probably know, the videos that Shags and I (Rushton) post for inspiration and learning something new are ones that we find and that you share with us. This one that Shags shared with me touched my heart. It's about an autistic boy with a special talent, and how it became something that his school could celebrate.

LEARN SOMETHING NEW

How to Learn Something New Every Day

And not just from YouTube, though it is a fine place to start!

Are you receiving the Members Only Weekly Bulletin?

Our Club News and Member links are now on the Members Only ClubRunner Site and are emailed weekly as a Club Bulletin. Please make sure your email address is current on ClubRunner.

Members, be sure to read our Weekly Club Bulletin, which is sent separately to your email address from ClubRunner each Monday. In it, you will find updates and information about what our members are up to, club activities, projects, Happy Dollars, news from District 5170, and various ways you can support The Rotary Foundation. We also send your Dues notices using ClubRunner email.

Our Weekly Bulletin, sent every Monday, provides club information. To stay informed, please ensure your email is current on ClubRunner and add mailservice@clubrunner.ca to your address book so it does not go into Spam.

PROGRAM: Bridging the Gap Between Solar Power and Desalination

SPEAKER: Jon Bessette

We bring you a new program every week on innovation, entrepreneurship, and education and how they contribute to service to others.

Desalination is a critical tool for addressing water scarcity, yet conventional renewable-powered desalination systems rely heavily on energy storage, increasing cost and complexity. In this talk, our speakers will present a novel control strategy—flow-commanded current control—for enabling direct-drive photovoltaic electrodialysis (PV-ED) with little to no energy storage. Their approach maximizes real-time energy utilization, achieving high water production efficiency while reducing and eliminating the need for energy storage.

Findings from a six-month field deployment of a fully autonomous, community-scale PV-ED system in New Mexico demonstrated 94% energy utilization while reducing energy storage requirements by over 99% compared to typical PV desalination systems. These results highlight the potential of PV-ED to provide cost-effective, decentralized water treatment for resource-constrained communities and its broader implications for sustainable desalination at scale.

Jon Bessette is a PhD candidate within the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research (GEAR) Center at MIT. His research is focused on the development of desalination and water treatment systems for resource-constrained environments: from off-grid communities in India to agriculture in the Middle East. Bessette earned a BS from the SUNY University at Buffalo (2020) in mechanical engineering with a minor in studio art, and an MS (2022) from MIT in mechanical engineering. Bessette is a former Fulbright scholar (2017), Critical Language Scholar (2019), Marshall Scholar finalist (2020), and NSF GRFP recipient (2020). He received the International Desalination Association Innovation Award (2023) for his work in batteryless photovoltaic desalination, is a part of the inaugural Morningside Academy for Design at MIT (2022), and is a J-WAFS Rasikbhai L. Meswani Fellow for Water Solutions (2024).

Members and guests, please welcome Jon Bessette!

Our Three Podcast Series

Our main program speakers are available as podcasts in addition to YouTube videos! Each week, they are available on Spotify and Apple podcasts.

Or you can click below for this week’s speaker:

The Weekly Rotarian

Inspiring Solutions

And our original podcast, featuring some of the best of our previous speakers, is still available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

Development Success Stories

Our third podcast features success stories about economic development from around the world. It is available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or you can click below.

UPCOMING PROGRAM RECORDING SCHEDULE

All of our guest speakers and programs are recorded live online over Zoom video conference. We welcome members and guests to join us in one of these upcoming recordings. Recordings are approximately 30 minutes long and are subject to change without notice.

Our online video conference room link for these recordings is always http://zoom.siliconvalleyrotary.com/. You are welcome to join us! Please note the timezone listed for all recordings is US Pacific Time (San Francisco, California, USA).

If you can’t join the live recording, please send your questions for an upcoming speaker to programs@siliconvalleyrotary.com.

THE ATTENDANCE SURVEY

Thanks for reading and watching this week’s meeting. You have two last things to do before you’re done.

We have a very short attendance survey below for you to fill out to record your attendance.

Visiting Rotarians, this is how you can get an email receipt to pass along to your club’s secretary as proof that you’ve attended our meeting if you need it for makeup.

Non-Rotarian Guests, we would love to see who is dropping by our meetings! This part is optional for you. If you think you may want to join our eClub at some point in the future, we would strongly recommend you fill out the attendance form as it will improve your chances of success for your membership application.

For all members and guests — we strongly recommend and ask that you leave a comment in our comments area below. Tell us how you enjoyed the program. Ask this week’s speaker any questions you might have. Or just stop by and say hello and tell us where you’re from!

Important: Once you submit the Attendance Survey below, please make sure you see the confirmation message. If you get an error message instead, please try the 'submit' button again, and if that doesn't work, please refresh the page and fill out the form again. Thanks!

Rotary eClub of Silicon Valley
Next

Global by Design: Leveraging Engineering Science for Global Development