When I look at photos of oil rigs sitting offshore, I see potential desalination plant sites. What if we located desalination plants off shore? Use solar to distill and the steam to electrify, per your idea, or use natural gas tapped by the rig, and pipe or transport by water tenders, the fresh water to the coast.
The trucks coming to and fro collecting desalination waste products (salts, etc) are eliminated, since waste will be dumped back into the sea after separating valuable minerals, which can also be transported back via tenders. Overhead costs could be covered by mining the gold and other minerals drawn up with the seawater.
Oil rig folks are happy, NIMBY people are happy, fish are happy, seagulls not so happy (and the enviroweenies will have one heck of a time convincing people seagulls are endangered since there are zillions of them).
I think you would be spending dollars to collect dimes.