[marcosdumay]

If solar power is cheaper than coal without subsides, it has greater than 1 EROEI by a big margin, and the question is settled.

Bottom-up studies suffer from a big diversity of flaws, and there are plenty of them with obvious bias both ways.

[_FKS_]

Fossil fuels are the base subsidy. It's hard to see how a manufactured product will be cheaper than fosil fuels consumed on the spot (as coal is primarly a local consumption resource). Also the economy of scale principle works here too: how can a (coal) thermal plant which feeds a region, cities, can be replaced by a collection of small scale devices that produce electricity, and pretend to be cheaper? Nothing will ever be cheaper than coal to produce electricity. There's a good reason why the industrial revolution started with coal and not with renewables (which for the record were already available in Europe for a few centuries before that - it was already widely used since the 12th century)

[marcosdumay]

If you use fossil fuels to create an energy supply, and the energy from this supply is cheaper than the original fossil fuel, that means your supply has bigger than 1 EROEI. (Unless your new supply has a subside.)