US renewable electricity output

It would be convenient to suppose that every new solar panel somewhere in Arizona provokes an American family to open a box of Catan, but the truth, as it so often is, is more complicated and slightly less charming. The two lines run together because the year 2020 had opinions about what people should do indoors. Policy and tabletops, on the same schedule.

The pairing is a lockdown coincidence with two very different mechanics. Board game revenue jumped sharply in 2020 as locked-down households rediscovered the pleasures of arguing across a dining table, while US renewable electricity output continued its policy-driven rise — a decade-long trend of wind and solar additions that happened to post a particularly steep year as overall demand briefly fell. Neither is caused by the other; both are trends that happened to bend in the same direction in the same strange year.

We are left with the image of a country playing Monopoly by the light of a wind turbine, which is funnier than it is accurate. The correlation proves only that 2020 gave many trend lines a polite shove. The dice and the grid were simply rolled together.