Peak energy production would be a good time to train the damn llms instead of building natural gas power plant I guess.

Solar panels need an aperture.

Again, though, using gravity batteries or pumped hydro is a great way to manage excess juice, though these are expensive options.

Batteries? Boil water? Anything?

You can’t just dump grid power — it needs to go somewhere. The grid needs to consume as much as it generates at all times or else bad things happen.

we figured out this problem centuries ago it is called capacitors. long term it is called batteries

Maybe I don't know enough about electricity at large scale, but at small scale you can just cut the circuit. Electricity isn't like water that just sits in the pipe when you close a valve, right?

You can dump megawatts. But there is no need for that. It's not like solar panel inverters will just keep increasing voltage until they can push the power into the grid. They have an upper limit.

Basically I don't see your point

The extra power issue is not that hard to solve, when you get close you can start mandating the inverters to have smart connection to the grid, so they stop providing power to the grid if demand is satisfied.

No. No no no. You can literally turn solar generation off, nearly instantly. It's called curtailment and it's done all the time in saturated markets. Older residential inverters don't have the reactive technology, but residential solar is a drop in the bucket compared to utility-scale solar.

Lack of capitalist imagination

We own the land you need to build the solar panels on.

We own the factories that build the solar panels

We own the solar farms.

It's colosally stupid to tie solar power generation to It's economic value. We are quickly heading to a future with climate extremes without doing something different.

My unscientific personal experience answer to your last paragraph’s question:

The study didn’t anticipate that California power companies would be so unbelievably corrupt and that the price of electricity would nearly double since 2021. We pay $.40-$.60/kWh while the national average is like $.12-$.16 so us Californians are willing to do literally anything to get away from the PG&E cartel. There is supposed to be a governing body that reins in the prices but it’s controlled by the Governor. In this case that’s Gavin Newsom who just happens to own hundreds of millions worth of shares in the utility companies….🤔

For most parts of the world, the only reason why the problem with the variability isn't solved yet, is because governments don't want to invest in the electricity grid. We have the storage technologies, the only thing missing is money. And it's unrealistic to say that energy needs to be trabsported from the Sahara to nordic countries. Finland already needs to cut its nuclear reactors, because the renewables in Finland produce so much energy. Only the furthest regions north can't use solar.

There are many ways to store the energy without chemical batteries.

We can use thermal batteries by heating water or other liquids and then release it at night. We can use kinetic batteries like compressing springs and then releasing them at night to turn a generator. Water batteries like hydro dams where you pump the water into a reservoir during the day and then release at night to again power a generator.