Sure, if you're doing a TCO analysis you figure out a deprecation schedule for your physical plant and your OpEx for the day to day operations. Of course the CapEx for "one" versus the CapEx per instance for "one thousand" will be quite different. Also how much site prep is needed, how much can be built offsite in a factory setting Etc. So a full economic analysis would incorporate all of that. Then price that against the price of fuel with the carbon and environmental externalities priced in, sure. That would give you a solid set of reasoning to say whether these systems are worse, similar to, or better than existing systems.

If you wait for all of that to be in place (versus risking capital today that might have been used for other things) then you risk dying from those aforementioned externalities of 'business as usual' (aka the do nothing hypothesis).

John was, in my reading, defining "efficiency" to be turning the solar power available as electricity in the surface area of the plant into liquid fuel. And my response to that is always that the solar energy was going to hit that patch of ground anyway, and if you don't have the infrastructure to move it to where it is needed "right now" or store it, then its wasted. California is, today, having days where Solar and/or Wind generation is discarded because there are no customers demanding it. At some point (hopefully soon) we'll get better at dealing with this situation, and converting that "extra" power into syngas is a good use for it.