[phil21]

At some point society will realize comparing power pricing to the lowest cost per kwh on a given day is a silly waste of time.

What matters is what is the most realistic mix of power generation and storage for 24x7 reliability. This can of course look very different depending on the situation. Many will argue for distributed storage (e.g. home batteries) - but that just means poor people don't get reliable electric service.

I really don't find that solar is "too cheap to meter" during peak sunlight very interesting. Who cares. What I find interesting is that I can turn a dial on my nuclear power plant to whatever it is I feel like at any time, and have it operating at that capacity within an hour or three.

Since we have such a dial, if you owned both the solar and the nuclear plants you would very likely combine them in a manner that maximizes profits while maintaining continuous service. Short of clouds, regional solar and wind prediction is extremely good to the point that modern nuclear plants may as well be load following. Add in a bit of battery for those minutes (hours max) that surprise you and you're good to go on that front.

You still will need some gas peaker plants for those crazy once-in-a-decade days you don't want to overbuild nuclear capacity for, but you could drastically reduce this infrastructure from what is effectively a 1:1 ratio today.