"Thermal solar can provide base load today"
Sorry, no. That's simply not correct.
The biggest solar installation in existence is a 392 Mw plant in the Mojave Desert that cost about $5.00/watt capacity (which works out to $10.00/watt considering that it doesn't work at night).
That's about twice as much per watt as coal.
It produces electricity at a wholesale cost of about 14 cents per kilowatt hour. The average retail cost of electricity in the United States is about 13 cents. It's an interesting experiment, but no, it doesn't make economic sense.
That's for a measly 392 Mw plant. A large coal plant cranks out 5 Gw, and a large hydro plant can be up to 20 Gw. We don't have that many Mojave Deserts, dude. Not to mention what the environmentalists are going to say if we start covering any substantial fraction of the Mojave Desert with solar plants (this one alone covers 3,000 acres of land).
Wind, with or without batteries, involves similar costs, unreliability, and land use problems, and batteries in general are one of the most environmentally nasty technologies we have.