solarpunk memes

You can cut it, but how? If you don't have a system in place, thousands of private home will be injecting power into the grid because they don't know any better. In extreme cases it could overload the grid. Not really explode, but cause voltage spikes, trip breakers, and ultimately (and somehow ironically) cause a blackout as the grid protection mechanisms kick in.

I Germany all new installations need to be able to be remotely controlled to prevent grid feed in when there's too much production.

Disclaimer: hobby self-taught solar panel enthusiast, not an electrician or grid engineer.

Solar panels have no problem if nothing consumes the power they can produce.

Wind turbines can be feathered and the turbine break engaged until they stop, at which point they're not generating anything.

So negative energy prices are not really a technical problem of renewables, rather they're due to the way the decision of "who stops their generation" being left to market systems - rather than there being some kind of centralized control, possibly with agreements in place, that decides which generators are stopped first when there is excess generation, market prices just float as offer and demand float and individual suppliers are left to individually decide if it's worth it for them to generate for a given price or not and thus if they should reduce or stop their generation.

There are delays and inertia in the whole process of signalling demand/supply balance via market prices, so there result is that the price can overshot and undershot, the latter being sometimes all the way down to negative prices.

Yes solar panels and most renewables can be turned off easily if there is too much energy on the grid. The term for this is "curtailment". Some energy sources can't be turned off easily, like nuclear, large coal plants, and combined cycle gas turbines. So you will tend to turn off the easy things before the hard things.

The only major problem here is that this upsets the capitalists that own the generation; they don't want to pay for stuff that isn't producing money at every instance that it could be producing money. There are no real technical reasons why you can't curtail wind and solar plants whenever you need to.

Worth noting that a large amount of "renewables bad" you'll see is fossil fuel propaganda too, so be careful there.

We setup a 25kw setup recently in Pakistan but ran out of money to have inverter and batteries for it. So far they have been up for a couple months, none have exploded yet.