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"Well you see there is generations and generations of ghouls that have made their entire livelihood off the established and continued monopolization of vital resources such as water and power and for some reason the rest of us haven't gotten together and solved that clear and obvious threat to everyone and everything collectively, I know I don't get it either."
I get the sentiment but... When sun isn't shining the negative prices cause problem for baseline power producers who need to turn off their power plants to avoid the zero to negative power prices.
This causes the power prices to become volatile, since the investments for the power plants that run during the night need to be covered during the night only.
Eventually though the higher price volatility will encourage investments into either demand side adjustability or energy storage systems. This will play out in energy only markets.
The other alternative is to implement a capacity market, which will divide the cost of the baseline production across different production hours by paying producers more for guaranteed production capacity.
Hear me out: a giant water balloon. Roughly the size of the sun.
Great comments in here that understand the actual issues, instead of, ya' know, the usual.
Something I haven't seen in the thread: Can someone address the costs of keeping the infrastructure maintained? Free power sounds great, but it can never be free. Entire industries must be paid to manufacture pylons, wire, transformers, substations, all that. Then there are the well paid employees who are our boots on the ground. (Heroes to me!)
How is solar disrupting the infra costs?
The actual issue, as stated in the original article is value deflation, aka investors not making enough money to justify energy transition to a timeline where humanity still exists in 100 years. Decoupling the issue from the political and economic aspect is disingenuous at best.
If anyone is curious as to why we don't run the world off solar, from what I understand the big issue is power grid frequency. Unlike a turbine, solar has no intertia. If you take away light the power drop is instant. With turbines, they keep spinning due to their weight. This is especially important since if a large load is suddenly energized, the turbine might slow down but still won't stop immediately. Maybe in the future giant electric powered flywheels or pumpgen systems can take up the slack. Nuclear would likely also help since those are essentially giant steam turbine generators. Good video with some more info here.
Those flywheels are already being installed right now
https://www.neso.energy/news/first-phase-stability-pathfinders-delivered
This feels like it is begging for further context.