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Many places with water shortage are sunny and hot. In my mind it is the perfect use case for solar thermal power plants. I just love how simple they are. If we build coal or nuclear power plants, we just ditch one problem for another.

It is also a great way to smoothen the varying production of renewal energy.

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That's an interesting idea as well. A molten salt reactor or something similar would have the same benefits as nuclear, you just trade reliability for cleanliness. I would imagine that a molten salt set up would be significantly cheaper to build as well, but I could be wrong on that.

A good thing is that you don't care about normalizing usage: if the plant happens to only work during the day, it's fine, you can make fresh water during the day and use your storage tanks at night. Unlike with batteries, there's basically no waste in storing water overnight.

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