It's a problem preventing solar penetration beyond a niche market. It also, as you point out, prevents solar from actually displacing existing power plant capac

It's a problem preventing solar penetration beyond a niche market. It also, as you point out, prevents solar from actually displacing existing power plant capacity. That means that solar power comes at an extraneous cost, since it doesn't obviate the need of building even a single non-solar power plant. Those are big problems and it's not as though we're magically going to start building lots and lots of solar power capacity without solving those problems. The sooner their tackled the faster those technologies will be on the amortization/improvement train and their costs will fall. Solar and wind are today just sideshows in power production, if you want them to be otherwise the smart move is to invest in storage technologies.