America now has more solar energy workers than coal miners

Though not as fast as I would like, the renewable energy business is growing.  Solar installations, solar workers, megawatts generated --- all the statistics keep showing improvement.  A recent study that took into  account all the costs of mining, transporting, and manufacturing to create photovoltaic (PV) panels predicted that within a few years, solar energy will have produced more energy than it took to create the solar infrastructure.  Everything after that is gravy, I guess.

From TreeHugger:

The Solar Foundation, which has been releasing reports for a few years on the state of the solar industry in the U.S., has just launched a very cool interactive map that breaks the stats down state by state. This allows us to see that there are only 80 solar jobs in Alaska (not too surprising), and over 43,000 in California. Add all 50 states together, and solar employs 119,000 people in the country, a growth of 13.2% in 2012.

Another interesting way to gain perspective is to compare these solar jobs to the number of jobs created by other sectors. Looked at it this way, the Solar Foundation (using stats from the Bureau of Labor Statistics) found that there were more solar energy workers in Texas than ranchers, that solar workers outnumber actors in California, and that across the whole 50 states, there are more solar workers than coal miners.

Solar foundation/Screen capture

The top 3 states for solar jobs are California, followed by Arizona, and New Jersey.