For clarity I was using “service” in a technical sense.
Ground mounted panels can be serviced from a bucket truck right after a hail storm or other disaster. Disaster recovery is a critical design criterion for electrical infrastructure and the bucket truck is the standard electric utility service vehicle.
Electrical utilities depend on each other and dispatch their fleets of bucket trucks across the country to aid in disaster recovery. If you drive much across the country, you might come across convoys of bucket trucks deploying down an interstate.
Which is to say cherry pickers don’t easily scale to handle the kind of critical events that need to be handled with electric utility infrastructure (and as an aside, in a pinch ground mounted solar panels can probably be serviced from a half ton pickup).
For context, in a former life I was an architect and one of my clients was an electrical co-operative. I also know a lineman socially.
You can read more about this project and the players in this article and draw your own conclusions:
https://solarbuildermag.com/projects/california-completes-wa...