Indeed, all true Jo, thanks for your response.
I agree Solein doesn't look very appetising, but I bet if we were sitting in the street somewhere with nothing else to eat, we would bite someone's hand off for it :)
On the energy lifetime analysis of solar panels, there is an awful lot of misinformation around that, the vast majority of it by corporates, and corporate invested folks. Solar is intrinsically anti-corporation in many ways, that is what they really don't like about it. And banks, well just look at the history, JP Morgan defunded the original Tesla 120 years ago, because Tesla wanted to deliver solar sourced energy to all, combined with internet-like connectivity. They both knew free energy meant free money, but Tesla mistook JP for someone with the interests of humanity at heart, when actually all JP was interested in was the longevity of his bank.
A futher basic misconception around solar, is the difference between it and a pile of capital, hence why folk usually try to show profitability of it, and yet the potential output over time of an single panel in its lifetime can't be predicted, only estimated. Skeptics tend to underestimate, deliberately.
Another thing folk haven't latched onto yet, is that solar farms generating valuable things like hydrogen are financially sustainable, by channeling some of the funds received from sales of product back into replacing, and even scaling up the installation. Effectively, if there is no shortage of land available to a solar farm, it can be as big as anyone could ask, since the bigger it is the more it can sell, why not expand it until the market is saturated with fuel (Or food).
When we look at it like that, the capital cost of the farm is inconsequential, because it will very quickly be made insignificant by the returns from sales, which effectively are unlimited. It is literally not possible to compute an EROI in that scenario, because there is no reasonable limit we can put on the energy which will be received from a fully sustainable and even scaleable facility. Even the efficiency of the panel doesn't matter so much, as long as enough real estate is available to scale to the levels needed.
Btw, I would question your 1 percent plant efficiency.
How was it measured, and what kind of plants?
A tree, by my quick estimates absorbs many hundreds of megawatt-hours in its lifetime. It has nowhere near that amount of carbs in its structure at the end of its life, so most of the energy it absorbed has to have gone into the ground as nutrients from its roots, it seems to me.
I had this disputed previously be someone claiming some scientific background, a person who supposedly knew about trees.
I am Engineer, so can't claim to know much about trees, only that nutrients flow within them, and to me that flow has to be bidirectional, otherwise why would nature have put valves in the tree to stop valuable energy flowing to Earth?
All I can say is I don't believe this has properly researched, probably because no profit driven company, excapt maybe panel manufacturers would ever fund such research. It would definitely be something worth checking out though, because to me that lack of knowledge is quite a handicap to our progress.
