Large solar sites are required to be able to provide reactive power as well as maintain a power factor of 0.95 to avoid all of the issues you mentioned.

Reddit post by an EE explaining it better than I can: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/qhear9/commen...

> There are also factors like fault current handling that HN might think is trivial or to be glossed over, but without the ability to eat 10x+ rated load for a brief duration, faults on the grid cannot be addressed and the entire system would collapse into pointlessness.

I don’t understand what you are talking about here. I don’t work in the utility world, I sell and run commercial electrical work, but handling available fault current in my world is as simple as calculating it and providing overcurrent protection with a high enough AIC rating or current limiting fuses. I don’t see why the utility side would be any different.

The utility side has found that vaporising short circuits is a useful feature, as that includes e.g. twigs hitting a power line.

There are breakers, of course, but they react slowly enough that there will absolutely be a massive overdraw first. Then the breaker will open. Then, some small number of seconds later, it will automatically close.

It will attempt this two to four times before locking out, in case it just needs multiple bursts. It’s called “burning clear”, and it looks just as scary as you’d think… but it does work.

So, solar suppliers need to also survive this.

Reactive power handling concerns are in addition to the issues I described. Not equivalent to them.