These people do it with solar panels…

https://solarwatersolutions.com/

yesterday, right.....solar goes into the grid, the grid powers any industrial scale desalination..... silliness aside, there will soon be formats where co generation will be economic, solar to power desalination, the generated brine bieng used for just salt, and then also refined for sodium to make batteries to capture more solar to power plants to turn sand into glass and purified silicone to make more solar and refine aluminum and copper. agriculture in areas next to the ocean, where there is no fresh water, and essentialy free, barren flat land....fully robotisised greenhouses the current scale of PV production is unbelievably huge, and growing.... land might be too expensive in California, but in Peru on the coast, there are never any clouds and vast areas that only need water to be productive, also as a desert, there are very few bugs and diseases to deal with, and even a short distance between operations would serve as an effective quarantine

Sadly I think AI is going to push that further out if we ever get to that point.

We first need to replace all fossil energy with electricity, so there's a long way to go still.

Battery storage growth has been incredible and you can see the gains almost weekly:

https://www.gridstatus.io/records/caiso?record=Maximum%20Bat...

It looks like batteries are now able to displace 100% of imports (which are mostly gas) for a period after sunset, eg here from yesterday:

https://www.gridstatus.io/live/caiso?date=2025-07-08

Even just a few weeks ago, imports would begin as soon as the sun set.

No, that is still onshore wind according to Lazard.

Solar seems set to overtake though both are predicted to continue to drop in price and the cheapest examples of both are currently the same price to build new as running existing nuclear or gas combined cycle plants.