[renaudg]

1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.

2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source

[don_esteban]

Overprovision to cover the night is only 2-3x, not a big deal. Storage (batteries, hydro, heated sand/whatever new thing you can come-up with) for night use is also much easier.

The real problem is seasonal variation: The total amount of stored energy is much larger (~100x) and you cycle it (and, hence, pay for storage) once a year, not 365x.

Wind + long range power transfer should help. At the cost of today's overpriced nuclear powerplants you can fund a lot of storage research and installation.

Perhaps you can use overprovisioned solar to eletrolyse water and use captured C02 (ideally from air) to generate methane or more complex hydrocarbons, for use in applications where electric power just won't work (e.g. long-range flight), or for long term power storage. Yes, there are significant conversion losses, but overall it is still in the low multiplies, not 200x.

[sehansen]

Land use per kWh is almost completely unimportant. Here in Denmark solar farms take up 0.09% of the land area and produce 7% of our electricity or ~2.5% of our energy use. That means 4% of our land area would be enough to cover all our energy needs.