I wouldn't make predictions like that until there were similar investments into storage or international/continental transmission. It could be done, but we're not doing it.
Storage and transmission are both self-fulfilling prophecies based on market economics. If it's cheaper to store or transmit clean renewable power than it is to use expensive coal or nuclear plants, the investment will be made (I discount distributed/rooftop solar for this argument, but it is important to note that distributed solar reduces the need for transmission).
Transmission lines are currently being bid out and built to bring cheap East Texas and Oklahoma wind to load centers [1]. An enormous amount of lithium battery manufacturing capacity is coming online worldwide to satiate EV manufacturing requirements. Those facilities will also produce stationary storage.
Certainly it will, but to reach the storage levels required we're going to need 10 more gigafactories for batteries alone. Any alternative storage tech (molten salt or whatever) is 10+ years away. Clever distributed solutions such as using EV car batteries will require massive renewals of smart grids (which will move glacially)
It's going to take more than 10-15 years. Way more. It'll take 10 years from the date that we see massive investments on the scale of the OP into storage as well as the panels.
I'd say optimistically, in 10 years we'll have enough PV installed that the problem of PV overproduction (and negative prices on the market) will finally be big enough that it will cause mass-adoption of storage to begin, which will then take another 10 years to get going.
I think I fall between the two extremes of the parent and grandparent comments.
I think there are at least 10 gigafactory scale battery plants in the process of being built, so that's a positive sign.
I also believe that EV batteries will benefit the grid with basically no added infrastructure. Let someone sign up for a special tariff that gives them cheap power at certain times and let the computer in the car decide when to start charging. Already happening today with dynamic info from the net on carbon intensity predictions.
Finally, overproduction of solar and wind are not problems in themselves, nor are negative prices a problem. People repeatedly stating they are a problem is a bigger problem for renewable energy than the so-called problem.
As you correctly go on to imply they are an opportunity for storage and demand response but the bottom line is that wasting energy is not s problem as long as the costs (financial and environmental) when divided over the energy that is used, is lower than the next best alternative.
