At some point someone has to consider storage (or alternative provisioning, or dispatchable load) for solar-backed grid. Even if it's not the homeowner with panels on their own roof.
This is where I'm hoping the combo of electric cars and solar will pay off. The car can provide a local buffer when the family is at home during the night, but isn't needed when the sun is shining.
I think the missing piece of this puzzle can hopefully be filled by something like Ambri's (previously LMBC) liquid metal battery tech [1]. A shipping container or two per suburban block, or urban building should be able to provide enough buffer, and then the load is sort-of evenly distributed, and hopefully makes the power management of the grid a little bit simpler as a side effect.
Theoretically with solar panels you could have a round-the-clock, round-the-globe balanced network requiring no storage. It would be a network with the same capacity of panels on each meridian. Of course this is not very practical.
Not only not very practical but it would require entirely new transmission technologies: the maximum practical length of a 60Hz transmission line is only a few thousand miles. To go from the bright side to the dark side of the earth is worst-case 12,000 miles so new tech would be needed, or you'd just have to suffer 30% (or more) transmission line loss.
