US renewable electricity output

The idea that rising solar generation has anything to do with the national output of rawhide chews is not, on its face, a serious hypothesis. And yet the two lines are holding hands. One must conclude that charts, like pets, sometimes behave out of character.

Both rose steadily through this period with entirely separate mechanisms: renewable electricity climbed on federal tax credits and falling solar panel prices, while dog treat sales surged on pandemic pet adoption and the guilt-spending of remote workers stuck at home with newly acquired puppies. The two trends intersected in 2020 because both had particularly steep lockdown-year jumps for unrelated reasons.

So the correlation is two rising curves whose only shared variable is a calendar. Renewables and rawhide do not talk to each other. They only happen to trend the same way.