That and incentivise smart devices like water heaters that run when power is cheap, which is effectively a rudimentary battery

Problem is that storing electric energy at a large scale is really difficult, with lots of engineering and research effort going into finding solutions. Investment into storage is good, but it's still an area of active research how to even do it.

No, you can't.

The ground in a circuit doesn't dissipate energy

the energy gets dissipated elsewhere. That's what ground is: it's what we call the electrical part of a circuit where the energy has already been dissipated (I'm being a little casual with my electricity, but I think it's a valid statement nonetheless

ground is defined as the zero potential).

You can try this out by plugging a wire from hot to ground in your house (please don't do this). The energy gets dissipated in the wires. This is bad, because it is a lot of energy dissipated very quickly. Best case you throw the breaker. Worst case you burn down your house.

It's weird that that's possible as such an easy solution, and all those electrical engineers never thought to use it, instead putting in load banks and all sorts of contrivances to heat metal in an emergency, or find complex ways to hide excess production in normal load and balance production by managing the generators.
Even weirder that the people who run solar grids opted to pay people to take excess power rather than just dumping it on the ground, although a lot of them have also taken to heating metal instead, or water for smaller home setups.

Yes, you can technically connect your generator directly to the ground. This isn't something people want to do because it can damage equipment.
It's why that heating metal trick is used as part of the emergency shutdown rather than as part of load regulation, and they don't want to use it because they have to make sure the right bit of metal melted.

None of this has anything to do with people needing to react to excess current in an electrical grid, and not just let it be a situation that happens. It requires intervention was the point of the phrase.

As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can't just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.

If you could do that there'd be tones to research going on about how to extract the energy stored in the ground as the storage capacity would in many orders of magnitude greater than we have now. We'd also be probably capturing the energy released in thunderstorms.

A chance for @bradorsomething, son of Gondor, to show his quality!

When we refer to the grounded conductor (the neutral), it does have a reference to the ground potential of the building receiving power. But the current generated by the power plant seeks the least resistive path back to its source, and the grounded conductor provides a path back to the generation plant that carries no voltage potential for electricity to draw towards or away from - the wire simply accepts the flow of energy to or from the power plant, to complete the circuit without changing the voltage potential.

There is also a grounding wire, which is green or bare, which is present in building in the US to allow anything electrified by stray wires to complete the circuit and trip the breakers in the panel. This wire joins to the grounded conductor (the white colored neutral) at the main panel where the utility provides power… utilities use the neutral as their ground, so current completes the circuit back to the power plant through the neutral.

When I say “the circuit looks for a path back to its source,” I’m playing a little fast and loose here… the current seeks the most potential to complete the circuit pathway. This path is almost always the return path to the power plant.

Join us next week, when I explain that lightning doesn’t care much about our wire at all, because at that scale it’s like the ocean caring about a moat at a sand castle!

Because we're not doing those things at the moment?

Having a solution available doesn't make it not a problem.

Something having a problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing, and not all problems are bad things, they're just things that need figuring out.

People too often think that identifying an issue with something means that it's being argued that we should abandon it or that it's unfixable.

Solar is not a perfect technology, because there are no perfect technologies. It has solvable problems are or will need to be addressed as we keep using it. That's fine and normal.