A 450 to 1 ratio sits comfortably inside that band, toward its upper half rather than at its center. That single data point, drawn from an essay arguing that renewable energy systems carry a systematically undercounted upfront energy cost, holds up reasonably well. A 2024 Nature Energy analysis using a different, useful-stage framework reported a median eROI of 11.4 for solar and 23.6 for wind. A Department of Energy-published rebuttal describes its system boundary as inconsistent and its inclusion of a large set of non-energy inputs as arbitrary, a criticism echoed elsewhere in the eROI literature. That finding complicates any simple ranking of technologies by net energy return regardless of which side of the debate is doing the ranking.