This line of thought interested me so I went and looked for some numbers. The 10 sqkm 648 MW Kamuthi Power Plant [1] was built in record time in 2016 at a rate

This line of thought interested me so I went and looked for some numbers. The 10 sqkm 648 MW Kamuthi Power Plant [1] was built in record time in 2016 at a rate of 11 MW/day with a crew of 8500, which comes to about 2 months. This project is many orders of magnitude larger, lets be generous and say there is a 20x economy of scale in this project above Kamuthi: 100 sqkm / mo / 8500 crew. With 100 such crews (a lot) it would still take 3/4 of a century just to install 9M sqkm, and the installation alone would employ ~1M people. Wow. According to [2], the degradation rate varies between 0.5%-1% per year. Using a generous 0.1% as an estimate for maintenance would put it at 9000 sqkm needing maintenance/replacement every year which according to the estimates above would only require ~10 full-time crews from above. Still ~100k people, a big city for sure, but not millions. Another thing to consider is that a project of this size would be decades in the future and I imagine it would heavily employ automation, so dropping a couple zeros off the number of people required could be quite feasible. [1]: https://qz.com/india/854483/worlds-largest-solar-plant-kamuthi-india/ https://qz.com/india/854483/worlds-largest-solar-plant-kamut... [2]: https://medium.com/@solar.dao/everything-you-need-to-know-about-operations-maintenance-o-m-for-utility-scale-pv-solar-plants-9d0048e9b9a2 https://medium.com/@solar.dao/everything-you-need-to-know-ab...