On Sept. 8, the Biden administration’s Department of Energy issued a new report, “The Solar Futures Study,” which claims solar energy could power 40 percent of the U.S. grid by 2035 and 45 percent of the grid by 2050. The report, produced by the DoE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO) and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), proposes this could be done without raising the cost of electricity, thanks to continued technological improvements and “demand flexibility.” Expanding on what “demand flexibility” would mean, the report hints at the possibility of expanded real-time changes to electricity pricing, “enabled by Internet-of-things appliances and communications.” Solar capacity would have to reach 760-1,000 gigawatts by 2035 to realize either of the report’s two decarbonization scenarios (the report also includes what it calls a “business as usual” scenario). For context, the United States had installed roughly 80 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2020 according to …