You grow e.g. sugar beets, convert them to alcohol and some byproducts (that go back into the farm as feed and fertilizer), use the alcohol in generators and vehicles. You're operating within your solar budget, the atoms that make up the alcohol came from water and air so all your nutrients and trace minerals stay on the farm and the fuel is carbon-neutral (all the carbon released when you burn the fuel originally came from the air in the form of carbon dioxide, not from underground fossilized carbon), and it can be done with simple off-the-shelf tech that has been around for literally thousands of years. You don't have to scrap your ICE cars and trucks, you can modify them to work with alcohol as fuel (some cars it's a software mod!) and the exhaust is not poisonous.
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Here's a video of Václav Smil at Driva Climate Investment Meeting 2019 giving a talk called "Investing in a changing climate – what we can learn from historic energy transitions". https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk The presentation is IMO very interesting, and the conclusion is sobering: "Only absolute cuts in energy use would work." ( https://youtu.be/gkj_91IJVBk?t=2283 )
We use too much power. And when I say "we" I mean mostly the USA but the rest of the world is ramping up rapidly. Unless there's a miracle (like clean fusion generators that kids can make in the garage out of chicken wire, tires, and ducktape) the only physically realistic way to de-carbonize fast enough to really matter is a drastic reduction in power use.
This is possible, and we can (I believe) maintain our quality of life, but we have to start now and work quickly.
The good news about that is that our systems are enormously wasteful so there is a lot of "low-hanging fruit" when it comes to reducing power usage through increasing efficiency.
The bad news is we are still going to have to make changes, pay for them, and yeah, make some sacrifices as well.
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In re: software to manage local grids efficiently, IMO that's not interesting. It's covered already. If you need fancy real-time dynamic "smart" manager software for your local micro-grids you're almost certainly doing it wrong.
Put something like Factorio in front of your grid as a UI and scenario planner and let the local kids run it. "Energy Club"