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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.

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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)

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.)

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