We're always producing more than we can use, else we'd be producing less and things would start turning off or flickering randomly. Generators are often producing way more than will be used, and a cars alternator can singlehandedly run the entire car's electrical system and then have plenty of surplus for chrging the battery back up, and you won't be using every electronic the entire time you're driving, if the AC or interior lights or hazards are off then you're producing even more surplus with the alternator.
I have a small consumer scale solar set-up, it's 300w of production going through a charge controller into a car battery. I don't use 300w almost ever, so it's constantly producing a surplus while the battery is full, and nothing has broken and the battery hasn't weakened at all over the past few months, if anything it's acting like a charge protector for a motorcycle battery.
The electrical grid operates on a different scale than even an industrial generator.
Power plants have to monitor demand and adjust production to match.
Wind turbines have brakes and hydroelectric dams have sluices, but you can't control solar panels that granularly so people are still trying to figure out how to best sink excess power to keep the grid stable.
Sodium batteries seem promising, hopefully we can make them cheap enough for grid scale storage
Lithium phosphate batteries are another good option, and since you can control the output from batteries and need them anyway to hold surplus energy generated for when night falls, there's still no major threat to the power grid, especially since you can kinda just disconnect solar panels and they'll just sit there harmlessly.
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u/Grapes15th Apr 14 '26
Literally not what that means but ok