I think this is artificially restricting the solution space.
We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation.
And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power usage patterns, hvdc lines, energy storage, houses getting more energy efficient to cool/heat by using insulation and heat/cold recovery in ventilation etc etc. Energy is currently just so incredibly cheap that most obvious improvements are left on the table or progressing at glacial speeds.
Only residential has fixed prices for electricity over the day. Industrial electricity has always been sold in variable prices, e.g. furnaces and other large consumers run when power is cheap and go into hold mode when it is expensive. There even is a large discount if you allow the power company to switch your consumption on/off. All that is already a reality and has been for decades.
Which goes to show: there still is baseload to consider, and there always will be. There is a green electricity ceiling that can only be circumvented with storage.
But still "base load" is no law of nature. Half the market is on fixed price, and regulation has so far dictated that there has to be a lot of "base load" type power production, and without co2 externalities priced in that's been profitable for producers too. But it's all rules and tech we invented and can be changed.
The amount of supply following the current industrial users are incentivised to do, and the requisite investments, will be much higher once the fixed price system is dismantled from the remaining portion of the market.
It's a term that means we can guarantee a set amount of power regardless of environmental conditions. Renewables are sensitive to environmental conditions, and we don't have a battery technology to bridge renewable variablity and hence the need for 'base-load'. In that context, 'base load' is a law of nature.
"base load" is also a statistical law of nature. Your consumers might want or need to consume your product regardless of the price. I will run my heating before I freeze to death, and I will thaw a meal before I starve. Somebody will switch on their lights in the dead of night. The hospital will run its MRI when an emergency arises.
All these things are rather randomly occuring things, some correlated, some uncorrelated. All these create a "ground noise" of consumption. All these things lead to a need for baseload power, which can only be removed by switching off the grid.
We have fixed price and supply of electricity over the day due to historical reasons, but it's not the future. And we can make the change gradually using variable pricing and speeding up the transition with the tools of regulation.
And of course other developments will help counter the price spikes - manufacturing and cooling systems adapting their power usage patterns, hvdc lines, energy storage, houses getting more energy efficient to cool/heat by using insulation and heat/cold recovery in ventilation etc etc. Energy is currently just so incredibly cheap that most obvious improvements are left on the table or progressing at glacial speeds.