There seems to be a blindingly obvious solution, to capture some economic value from the otherwise excess solar power generated -- Bitcoin mining. In theory, it's very similar to this application, using otherwise wasted gas flares from oil drilling: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/12/23-year-old-texans-made-4-mi...

Please note, I am not advocating for Bitcoin mining as a productive means of consuming electricity that could have gone to something else (either industrial or commercial or residential) -- I'm specially talking about what the article is covering, aka EXCESS generation that truly has nowhere else to go... Might as well convert that electricity into Bitcoin, to capture something (better than nothing) from the generated electricity.

If we're going to use excess power to run compute, I'd rather it go towards protein folding simulation. Something that might actually prove useful.

Carbon capture.

The issue with both is that hardware is expensive, so it's a tough sell for stuff that intends to sit idle half the time.

Then you need to have the hardware sitting idle when the power produced isn't in excess of what can be used. I'd guess that's not economically viable.

Or we could use it for an actually useful purpose, like charging batteries to handle peaks later in the day.