A Solar Power Plant designed to deliver 100% of the electricity after sunset

It depends on the depth of discharge and heat management.

Laptops, phones, etc have a poor lifespan because they are frequently discharged from 100% to almost 0%. It is better to discharge them from 100% to 50% and then recharge.

Batteries generate heat during charging and smart phones can get hot during heavy use. Without good enough cooling the lifespan of the battery drops.

The Pacific Ocean is pretty vast. When it's noon in Hawaii, there's not a lot of land area condusive to solar generation.

A global grid would be an immense coordination problem with tremendous costs. Some form of storage local to each grid is likely to be more cost effective. There are so many storage options, something should be appropriate as the need becomes real: pumped hydro / other mechanical, battery, synthgas (maybe), heat, pressure.

Even if it only reduces storage demands it seems potentially worthy.

May I add a proposal to convert the mediteranian sea into a pumped hydro storage with long-term capabilities? It would need the same dam as the Atlantropa, but possibly less extreme.

There are some basins around northern Africa that might be amenable to slight terraforming, or just a re-activation of Operation Plowshare to blow a cavern which has it's rubble content lifted out and then used for subsurface pumped hydro.

Alternatively plan to collapse the cavern roof into itself after filtering persistent radionuclides and waiting for short half-life isotopes to decay. Collapse via conventional quarry techniques (a circle of drilled wells filled with ANFO?) or iteratively with robots that go out towards the center and drill to blast this off somewhat continuously. Then use a nearby water reservoir to pump in-between. Salt content shouldn't matter much except corrosion protection techniques.

I guess it's not the public money they're trying to save!

Most power plants we use today can't deliver baseload cost effectively if you add in the externalized costs of climate change.

What would be even better would be if power-producers and distributors (or, more likely, aggregating intermediaries) made available some APIs that provide real-time data on pricing, sources of power and a degree of "peek a little way into the future" prediction. Then we could build/install devices that take advantage of that data. e.g. A fridge could heuristically trade off power price, next-hour likely pricing, source (maybe I prefer green energy or energy generated 'close by', and am willing to pay some premium; maybe I don't care and just want cheap), internal temperature and local time-of-day usage patterns affecting temperature management. (I chose 'fridge' as the example because its energy consumption can be time-shifted, but only to some degree. Eventually it is going to want to switch on regardless of energy supply conditions.)

On the flipside, appliances (water heating, fridges, cold-rooms, space-heaters,e tc.) should be encouraged to talk back to the suppliers APIs to indicate likely near-future demand, current constraints and demands and so on, so informing the 'grid' with demand data at micro-scale.

I guess this is something like what people might mean when they speak of making the grid 'more intelligent'...