This figure, first
found by the Washington Post, is according to the Solar
Foundation, and includes jobs in installation, manufacturing,
sales, and development of solar panels in the US.

By comparison, the coal industry employs about 66,000
people, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics's
(BLS) recent finalized data from October 2015. (The BLS doesn't
specifically pool together job categories in the solar industry.)

Solar jobs do pay better than "average," but not better than coal
jobs. The
Solar Foundation reports that the median wage per hour for
those in assembly is $18, for installers is $21, for designers is
$27, and for those on the business side is $29.

All of these hourly wages are higher than the median across US
occupations, which was $17.09 per hour in May 2014 (the BLS' most
recent data).

Vivint
Solar technicians install solar panels on the roof of a house in
Mission Viejo, California on October 25, 2013.Mario
Anzuoni/REUTERS

But across the coal mining industry, the median hourly wage was
$26.80
in May 2014. And coal mining engineers make $41.46 on
average. So coal miners still make more than anyone, on average,
in the solar industry, partly because coal mining is much more
dangerous than installing or making solar panels.

The savings Obama cites are a little more difficult to verify,
though. The US Department of Energy
says on its website that solar customers in New York are
saving $11 million per year, while those in Arizona are saving
$13 million per year. But it doesn't say where these numbers came
from.

On average, Americans with solar panels on their homes save
$84 a
month on their electricity bills, according to Clean Power
Research, and about 784,000
homes have solar panels in the US, as reported by the Solar
Energy Industries Association. Taken together, Americans are
likely saving "tens of millions of dollars."

One big sticking point of note is that those savings don't
include the up-front cost of the system. Installing residential
solar panels costs between $15,000 to
$29,000 on average, according to Sunrun. It can take between
four and 19 years to pay back these costs across the US.

Last year, solar only provided 0.39% of the energy used in the
US, according to the
US Energy Information Administration. Coal was still the
biggest source of energy, powering 39% of Americans' electricity.

All of this just goes to show that Obama was right — and it's a
sign of a big shift in the energy industry.