Second little problem.
Our electric cars are power hungry. So far their all limited to economy and sporty class cars, until here pretty recently which are pretty efficient.
My leaf uses up to 400kwh per month, so when tons of people switch to electric then residential electricity demand is going to soar.
I have heard that "people should just use less electricity" adopting electric vehicles and using less electricity isn't practical. Using it for large scale power generation is kind of a waste.
Well nuclear was on track to replace a lot of fossil fuel capacity.
It went from a 0% market share to about 10% market share in less than 30 years, then 1996 the last commercial nuclear power reactor came on line and nuclears rapid market share growth flat lines soon after.
Had the United states continued to build nuclear power plants we could probably have around 1.3 maybe 1.5 trillion kwh per year of total generation capability, but we have been stuck at 800 billion kwh per year around for at least the last 20 years.
If the United States built that additional capacity to generate 500 billion kwh per year with nuclear power, around 250 million tons of coal wouldn't be burned every year, that could eliminate more than a third of coal generation we have now.
Around here I can reliably get 1kwh per day with a fixed 200w mono panel.
Let's say we want to eliminate 100 billion kwh per year of coal generation.
Chop up 100 billion kwh over 365 days, gives you 2,739,726 kwh per day. So I would need 2,739,726 solar panels of 200w or equivalent.
Should be easy enough to figure the rest from there.
Note, according to Wikipedia "most of the coal generation capacity is used to cover base load". So using nuclear power to replace coal is the better idea and using solar to replace coal was always destined to be dead on arival.