That still means that the energy balance is negative until that time.
Also : There's caveats in this study. They are calculating the point where PV electricity production starts exceeding energy use in PV production, assuming no rise from current production levels. This is not a good guide to use to decide whether a specific installation of PV is a net-energy-negative or not. Any small-scale installation north of, say, Detroit, will never be energy positive, and is just a loss. This includes most of the German installed base.
I was putting forth a credible resource that pretty much exactly addressed the topic, not trying to argue with what you said.
I guess a useful government regulation would be to require estimates of the energy consumed to make certain energy products available. It would be pretty much impossible to do at the point of sale for things like retail gasoline, but a given fuel distributor shouldn't have too much trouble calculating their average for some period of time (especially if they are getting reasonable numbers from upstream providers).
I talk about gasoline because I think it would be interesting to have numbers for more than just solar panels and liquid fuels are probably one of the more complicated places to do such a calculation. It should be relatively easy for pv manufacturers.
Also : There's caveats in this study. They are calculating the point where PV electricity production starts exceeding energy use in PV production, assuming no rise from current production levels. This is not a good guide to use to decide whether a specific installation of PV is a net-energy-negative or not. Any small-scale installation north of, say, Detroit, will never be energy positive, and is just a loss. This includes most of the German installed base.