Solar still uses boiling water, thermosolar at least, that has a lot of benefits over the photovoltaic cell, as it can generate energy steadily and even trough the night, here in chile they built cerro dominador, quite impressive thing.
it depends on the geography of the place, in my country it would be reasonably a huge challenge to build farms over the sea because of the geography of here (it's like a underwater cliff)
and still, I'm heavily pro renewables, but that doesn't I won't be pro nuclear also, both are crucial tech to de-carbonize the world.