According to the World Health Organization, more than 2 billion people in the world live without access to adequate clean water, and that number is expected to more than double by 2025.  As rapidly developing countries like India and China are adding millions to the ranks of the middle class each year, their existing water and power infrastructure struggles to keep pace.  This problem becomes especially acute in the developing world when one considers that a large part of the population live in rural areas, far away from any type of formal water infrastructure.  It has long been apparent that desalination is a viable solution but conventional desalination technologies, such as Reverse Osmosis and Multi Effect Distillation, are expensive, energy intensive, and unsustainable.  Furthermore, due to the centralized nature of conventional desalination plants, immense infrastructure projects are required to provide energy to the desalination plants and to distribute the clean water to consumers.