US renewable electricity output

Between 2015 and 2021, every new Snapchat user who joined to send disappearing photographs of their lunch apparently caused America to install a proportional quantity of solar panels. The r of 0.97 over seven years is statistically compelling in the way that a confidence trick is compelling — you know something is wrong, but the numbers are so clean. Perhaps Snapchat's ephemeral content philosophy inspired a generation to think about sustainable energy: use it and let it disappear. The climate scientists who missed this mechanism should feel embarrassed.

Both metrics are products of the same period of rapid technological scaling in the mid-to-late 2010s. Snapchat's DAU grew from roughly 100 million in 2015 to around 265 million by 2021, driven by smartphone ubiquity among Gen Z. Renewable electricity capacity in the US grew dramatically over the same period as solar and wind costs collapsed — utility-scale solar costs fell roughly 90% between 2010 and 2020. Both curves follow an S-curve adoption pattern characteristic of technology diffusion, and both were accelerating during this specific seven-year window.

Seven data points is barely enough to fit a line, let alone draw a conclusion, but the human brain finds patterns in seven things as readily as in seven hundred. The brevity of the dataset is itself the story.