From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%. It sounds like the main issue is how the incentives are set up and rewards are distributed, not with building more solar in and of itself.

This article is light on exact details. When prices go negative, who is paying that and how, exactly? It sounds like it's at least partially effectively a government subsidy through credits. Is that necessary to compel the amount of building? The article doesn't even ask that question. They talk about trades making large profits by buying electricity when it's cheap and selling it when it's expensive. How are they doing that? Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or they're predicting electricity demand and supply and trading derivatives, in which case what inefficiencies are driving that market to be very lucrative for pure traders? And finally, are the high electricity prices in California at all related to the wholesale pricing? From what I could quickly find online, California's wholesale prices are not particularly high (lower than Texas, in fact). But that's usually only part of a household's electricity bill.

>From a technical and high-level economic point of view, solar should be 'overbuilt' so that it supplied excess energy a decent percentage of the time, to make up for when it doesn't output near 100%....

> Either they're actually storing the energy somehow (which is something that likely should be rewarded), or ...

Storing it is the big problem. You can't just overbuild solar power and put the energy in the network. You need to meet the demand. ND that is problematic if you must mix and match different energy sources across the network.