Maybe rather than reselling into the grid, the signal could be to take office buildings and other mid-size industrial or government users off grid, and power them from their parking lot. Companies could make their employees whole for the contribution, and there would be less risk to powerline workers in case of an outage. Residential users could continue to be considered in base load, and large industrial users could take responsibility for their own draw.

Sure, the multiplicity of smaller generators is less efficient than single large generators, but as you say this is peak power (and a large generator sitting idle most of the day is pretty inefficient, too). And there's already lots of investment going into making those small power plants highly efficient - it is conceivable that increased effort to make large generators more efficient could lose out because of economies of scale going into automotive research.