Last year, a new solar system was installed every 2.5 minutes on average in the US, with over 200,000 systems being connected to the grid. This compares favorably to 2013, when a solar system was installed every 3.7 minutes on average, and that’s 4x more than in 2011 when only around 50,000 systems were installed (which was a record at the time). If we go back a bit further in time to 2001, new solar systems were only installed every 9-and-a-half hours on average. Talk about progress!

The trend is clear:

© GTM

So it’s not surprising that the solar industry is also creating jobs about 20x faster than U.S. businesses.

Australia is also impressive on the solar front. Despite having a much smaller population than the U.S. (23 million vs. 316 million), the country still installed a solar system every 2.8 minutes, or 185,890 solar systems in 2014.

In fact, Australians like solar so much that there’s already a solar system on 1-in-5 households (1.2 million solar systems installed across Australia since 2001) and 9 out of 10 Australian households are considering switching to solar power!

Kudos, Australians!