Solar panel installations per year

It turns out that if you want to predict how many solar panels Americans will install in a given year, you need only know how many times a particular billionaire has felt compelled to share his thoughts with the internet, a correlation so perfectly lockstep (0.962, for those keeping score) that one begins to wonder whether the universe is playing a joke on us, or whether we simply deserve it.

The thing is, both solar installations and Musk's Twitter output were riding the same wave of cultural momentum between 2015 and 2022: renewable energy was becoming genuinely affordable, policy incentives were expanding, and tech enthusiasm was bubbling through venture capital like champagne at a launch party. You could fit roughly 3 million solar panels in a space the size of Central Park, and in 2022 alone Americans were installing them at a rate that would cover the park in about 90 days—a sprint that happened to coincide precisely with the year Musk was most prolific online. The confounding variable, if you want to call it that, is probably just the cultural moment itself: a shared sense that the future was something you could tweet into existence, or wire onto your roof, or both.

We are creatures who see patterns because patterns are sometimes real, and sometimes merely the shadow of something else we're not quite looking at directly. The solar panels kept getting installed whether or not Musk kept tweeting, which is either reassuring or disappointing depending on your view of human agency. What we have learned is almost nothing, except that correlation really does work both ways.