Photovoltaic (Distributed Generation)

You might search on "voltage regulator" or "charge controller".

can't give a reference. it's my unstanding that capacitors can store power until needed.

Not in the time frames required here. In this instance batteries are almost certainly required. Supercaps would maybe take you farther down the road, but "they ain't there yet".

I went to a nice lecture that talked about a 10 Megawatt solar farm that was instrumented by General Electric. The actual technology was not talked about very much, but it is inverter based and more like double conversion. One inverter creates the DC (or is it +-? Don't know) and the other synchonizes and creates the sine waveform.

With this technology, it is possible for the array to provide current at zero volts or put another way, provide local power factor correction.

You want a high voltage DC buss and you probably do that near each group of arrays.