I must admit to being suspicious of the performance of solar panel systems.
Their intemittency, the substantial difference between winter and summer.
Overcast days etc have not been helped by no solution except batteries
which become a very large overhead.
Now comes this report that we all should read as if it is anywhere near
correct means we have all wasted a very large amount of money and made
a whole lot of CO2 which we pumped into the air. More than burning the coal !

The url is
http://tinyurl.com/zk96wew

We do have to leave oil and coal before they leave us but solar PV
does not seem to be the way to do it.

The title of this thread is wrong – you should've said "negative net energy". EROEI's the quotient not the difference, so it's above zero (though below one) when net energy's negative.

But the error in this thread's title is tiny in comparison to the errors in the study!

These include:
• 16% of the calculated “energy investment” is the capital cost. This relies on the false assumption that money's the direct result of someone making a profit (hence they calculated the energy used to make that profit). In reality the money comes into existence by being borrowed from a bank, whether or not any previous profit has been made. The correct figure should be zero.

• 19% of the calculated “energy investment” is labour. But that’s a societal cost; it should not be counted because the people would (assuming a competently run economy) be working anyway.

Just removing those bogus inputs is enough to get the EROEI figure up to 1.25. But there's more:
• The energy cost of integration of the intermittent PV electricity in the grid and buffering may also be exaggerated, as some of the equipment it relies on may already exist, and the estimated energy cost for operation of smart-grid infrastructure appears unrealistic; no reason is given to justify such a high figure. Using what I considered to be more realistic gets the EROEI up to 1.4...

...But in the high latitudes that the study's based on (for not even the study's authors could contrive evidence that solar cells are an energy sink in low latitude places like Australia) wind would be the main source of nondispatchable renewable electricity, with solar only used because it anticorrelates with wind. So if that energy cost is attributed entirely to wind, the solar EROEI figure rises to 1.58.

• Though I'm not entirely sure, I think the energy embodied for faulty equipment may be double counted. If so, that could bring the EROEI figure up to 1.69.

• The study used obsolete (2010) data, but efficiency's continually improving. So EROEI may exceed 2 already. If not, it will soon.

The latest study by a couple of German universities have both proved that both solar, & wind are net energy sinks.

The only use for either is crony capitalism, allowing shonks like Obama to dispense billions to his campaign backers.

When they cut the input price for excess power it caused a big drop in new systems. Now they are reviewing the input price so excess power reflects real cost of power.

Negative talk about solar and wind is nothing new, always coming from the same quarters.

Hasbeen, considering the dodgy assumptions that last study had to make to contrive the conclusion that solar is a net energy sink at high latitudes, the extraordinary claim that wind (which has a much higher EROEI) is a net energy sink should make any thinking person doubt the credibility of the study you're referring to – if it exists. But I think a more likely explanation is that it's an error on your part.

Comparing EROIE' s of PV and coal is like comparing politicians with scientists.
No comparison is complete because the EROIE of the construction of the coal power station , it's railway feeder, its, mining infrastructure is not being taken into consideration.
The same thing happens with nuclear which has an enormous cost to EROIE with all of the mining and processing plus transportation of ores and uranium let alone the disposal of the waste.
Sorry guys but this is another red herring that the coal lobby loves.