Why do you put such faith in metrics like "Lifecycle carbon emission", applied to solar, when this is clearly nonsensical, Will?

It is not possible to put a lifecycle on solar, other than to say it is infinite, if we accept that a solar farm can be maintained forerver by replacing its components, which do individually have lifetimes, one by one, as they fail, just like anything in nature does, even us, by human society.

KWh convert directly to Joules.

Sunlight converts to Joules and KWh.

Those joules come in forever, with no Joules asked in return by the sun, they truly are for free.

There is no other energy source we can say this about, this is what is something fundamental to solar, only solar.

In the case of those Joules you are suggesting to take from the sea, they don't come for free at all, they come from the kinetic stored energy of Earth, therefore taking them has a cumulative, subtractive effect, which we will not know the consequences of, until they become significant.

So that energy is not clean at all, far from it, it comes from finite Earth resources.