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Hmmm we have multiple CSP plants in southern Spain, I wonder if we could do that, because it has been predicted that Spain will desertify with coming climate changes.

My issue is what do we do with the byproducts of desalination? If I did understand it there's no really use for that, and I've seen that other countries just dump it into the water, which is a big no no for local ecosystems (and I guess for oceans ph levels if this becomes widespread).

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Straight up dumping it in the ocean is generally considered bad. The standard trick is to wash/mix the brine with fresh ocean water to reduce the concentration of salt before dumping it back. Another interesting byproduct that is often overlooked are the metals and minerals. Things like lithium (and even gold) are relatively abundant in sea water and could be recovered from the brine (at the cost of complexity of course).

That looks like a large scale operation. CSP is struggling to compete in Spain with PV, but I can see it happening with companies like Acciona or some other spanish utility behemoths.

Gold is not abundant in seawater: ~10 parts per trillion by mass.

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