Bazz that is a big bitch around here.

We have 139 new McMansions built on from 4000SqM to 7 acre blocks between us & the main road in the last 5 years. Most have solar panels, & most are bitching about hail damage, & tree branch damage, from flying branches in the occasional gale.

The last big one dropped 7 large trees across our road. It took over a dozen of us with 10 chain saws & a few 4WD utes with winches, 2.5 hours to clear them enough off just 2 kilometers so people could get cars through to their homes. An estimate was 15% of solar panels went that night.

Many of these people are tree change folk, although as many simply wanted living & breathing denied in ever growing cities. Most had left too many trees, & large numbers of then disappeared into the back of chipping trucks over the next few months. It helped, but there were still a number of tarped roofs after the next one.

Another big bitch was they could not use undamaged panels when the power was out for up to 5 days, they were useless. We had a couple of neighbors bring fridges & freezers to our place so we could run them off my 10KVA diesel gen set. We loaned the little 3KVA to another. We always have 200 liters of diesel in storage in spring to cover running the gen set when required. There are a lot of 5KVA gen sets in the area today, but I don't see many converting to electric cars around here.

No as I said a year or so ago, I did not save it and I could never
find the site again. Seems very likely +- 30% considering the millions
of solar panels needed to keep the US going on a sunny still day.

Up to 16 years, in fact.
ttbn,
Well, at least that'd bring us to 2037 well ahead of 2050.

I don't care what powers the engine so long as the car has no computers onboard and I remain its driver.
Yuyutsu,
Well said !

Bazz, replacing 10,000 a day on average in Australia wouldn't be that big a deal. Let's say that one person could comfortably replace 25 panels a day (Note: this is just replacing panels not installing the whole system. I expect that a replacement typically doesn't require re-installing support brackets/rails nor mounting the converter and wiring it into the house mains switch-board. These tasks have already been done). So that works out at 400 people/day, which allowing for the weekends and holidays is about 600 employees directly involved with replacement. So let's say 1000 people for the installation businesses, when allowing for sales people, office staff, bosses, etc.. And let's play it safe and quadruple it to 4000 people all up- this gives us a large error margin for the above guess and also allows for the people involved with the supply to the installation businesses, eg: import, delivery, warehousing, sales, office, etc.

Now, compare that to the number of people employed by the coal mining industry, which this webpage: http://www.statista.com/statistics/692159/australia-employment-in-coal-mining-industry/ puts at approx 40,000. An order of magnitude more people.

By-the-way: I'm not an environmentalist, nor do I really care much about the current global warming scare campaign. What I'm interested in is making money from investing. And anyone who bothers to look can see that transportation is going to undergo massive change over the next decade and primarily not because of Government policy but because of technology improvements and economics. Very soon, electric cars will dominate new sales simply because of economics- it will be cheaper for the general public to own an EV over the life of the car within years (especially if you already generate excess electricity from home solar).

Thinkabit, the situation may be better than you considered.
You were using home installations, whereas I was talking of solar farms in country areas.
There would be perhaps hundreds of panels on a site.
The work would be in many cases in remote areas requiring much
travel and staying away from home for numerous days.
Ultimately the sites will be spread along the most advantage latitude
to take advantage of time difference across the country.
The more spread out the higher the maintenance costs.
Having once been involved in a similar arrangement I know how costs escalate.