Solar panel installations per year

Baby Shark plays and US solar installations, both at numbers a 2015 reader would have called arithmetically impossible. The toddler watching for the seven-thousandth time and the rooftop generating its first kilowatt-hour, on the same calendar of impossibility.

Baby Shark crossed one billion YouTube views in 2018 and continued accumulating to over 13 billion by 2022, becoming the most-viewed video on the platform. US solar installations grew from about 2 GW per year in 2016 to over 30 GW by 2022 as the Investment Tax Credit, falling panel costs, and state-level mandates expanded deployment. Two completely unrelated platform-and-infrastructure lines sharing a window because both compounded steadily through the same six years. Different orbits.

The 2010s and early 2020s rewarded persistence. Two products that kept adding zeros.