These "estimates" are often conveniently cherry-picked to support some agenda, on both sides of every political debate. I've dug into a few like these and foun

These "estimates" are often conveniently cherry-picked to support some agenda, on both sides of every political debate. I've dug into a few like these and found that maybe they were valid 20 years ago, and nobody bothered to update the data point. Why? Because that would be inconvenient to their agenda. One that particularly annoys me is some right-wing pundits that keep insisting that solar panels can't recoup the cost of the energy invested into making them. That was true for the panels used to power portable calculators back in the 1980s! Some Ronald Reagan voters got this stuck in their brains and now they are unable to dislodge this factoid without surgical intervention. If you stop and think about it for ten seconds, it would be obviously absurd that there are huge industrial-scale solar power plants springing up by the hundreds globally if they were making a financial loss by selling less power than it took to make the panels! Not to mention that in all forms of power generation (fossil, nuclear, or renewable) the Energy Returned on Energy Invested (EREI) is a key metric that industrialists have been seeking to optimise for over a century now.