What would happen to the ability of solar panels to generate electricity after an intense freak hailstorm?

i think the panels are ok. You just gotta replace that shiny layer. But its actually ok not to. Its made of a mixture of plastic and silicone. Its durable in my point of view.

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Sorry if I don't have all the specifics you asked for, but Sun Power makes the most efficient solar panels on the market, at close to 20% efficiency. They have made cells with up to 25% efficiency in the lab. That doesn't make it the cheapest but means the most watts per square foot. Thin film panels are cheaper to make but not as efficient. They are about half as efficient as conventional silicon panels. First Solar makes the cheapest per watt right now. So I guess that makes them the actuall cheapest manufacturer. They are able to make them cheap enough to beat out the conventional silicon panels on a per watt basis, despite being less efficient. A company called NanoSolar has the price down close to First Solar's price. These are manufacturers. But they do installations and build utility and commercial scale projects. NanoSolar is less far along in commercialization. They have products, but probably need to wait for the stock market to be more favorable for IPOs, so they can go public and raise the money to move up to scale. The other two are already public.

I agree, this is a very good question and you've made some wonderful points. I do think this is something that would need to be watched out for and you put it into perspective very cleverly! If we started relying a lot more on solar power as an alternative source of power, I am thinking insurance companies would have to extend coverage to these types of things. After all if anything is installed to a home it becomes "Real Property" instead of "Personal Property" and all "Real Property" is covered under insurance iniciatives.

You ask a good question and possibly answer it in part.

This is another thing for science and technology to grapple with.

It occured to me that insurance companies would also have to re-adjust how they formulate their policies?