Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Can they not route excess electricity into the ground?
No, unfortunately, you can’t.
Ground doesn’t typically dissipate power, rather, power is dissipated in the circuit/load — so if you just hook a wire to ground, you’re dumping gobs of power into the wire. If you do this in your home (DON’T), best case it will trip the breaker, worst case it will melt and catch something on fire.
It’s easy enough to burn a kilowatt — just boil some water. But it’s entirely something else to burn megawatt, or yikes, gigawatt scale power.
It seems braindead simple to me to work some controls into an industrial scale solar array to manage its output by regulating its input. Like, rotating the panels to put them out of their optimal alignment with the sun or mechanically partially covering them with shutters.
Simple but extremely expensive.