So if you have a smarter solar panel, or a smart battery, you can stabilize the grid. I’m assuming that all of the traditional software complexity things in distributed systems apply here: you want something a little bit smart, to gain efficiency benefits, but not too smart, to gain robustness benefits.

My intuition is that bringing the market into it at small timescales probably greatly increases the efficiency significantly but at the cost of robustness (California learned this “the hard way” with Enron)

> Phase matching is still required, wherever the phase difference is not zero there is a deadweight loss of power as heat

If the electronic controller is “ahead of” (leading) the grid, then that heat would come from the solar plant; if it is “behind” (following) then that heat comes from the grid. Is that right? And likely, solar plants opted for the simplest thing, which is to always follow, that way they never need to worry about managing the heat or stability or any of it.

I wonder if the simplest thing would be for large solar plants to just have a gigantic flywheel on site that could be brought up via diesel generators at night…