ERoEI* (ER over EI star) is better than ERoEI.

 Thanks, Dallas Weaver, for the encouraging remarks and your great way of providing examples. I shall now try to get you to adopt a different way of computing ERoEI. Let us suppose that we can compute ER taking account of defective equipment and its replacement cost and associated down time. Further, let us suppose that we can compute EC, which we shall define as everything that goes into the manufacture, installation, maintenance, mothballing, indemnity for lateness and other delivery contretemps, environmental protection, and retention of storehouses of vital materials at almost negligible drawdown of their global repositories - accounting for the direct and indirect aspect of every category. We have tried to account for everything except support and other payments to the stakeholders whether the process under investigation is their sole interest or only a minor part of their economic activities. Let us take the sum of all such payments to personnel rendered in appropriate energy terminology and call it ES. Now, there is no reason to suppose that anyone had a' priori knowledge of these numbers; therefore, we do not expect ER/EI = ER/(EC + ES) to be exactly 1.0 (as I said incorrectly earlier.). If it is greater than 1.0, we have produced net energy that can be used to support free-loaders or some other specialized purpose. However, every useful citizen has already been paid even if he only hits a baseball with a bat for the amusement of energy workers and their other supporters. If it is less than 1.0, it is not sustainable. However, measures can be taken to improve matters.

Now the point is this: We do not require this ERoEI to exceed 1.0. After all, we could boot out the free loaders rather than support them etc. (I have been calling it ERoEI*.) Take a look at https://eroei.blogspot.com/ for crossed tees and dotted eyes.