Producing solar panels requires an advanced technical civilization being in place. You cannot jump from middle ages tech to producing solar panels with skipping dependence on fossil fuels in the intermediate steps.

You can still use water and wind which are also powered by the sun.

We had water and wind power for centuries before the industrial revolution happened.

Your point being?

It’s hard to extract the huge amounts of energy we get from fossil fuels from these sources without having a cheap energy source available to get you started.

Hard does not matter. If it takes the new life 100k years to go from agricultural to the industrial revolution rather than the 10k years it took us they will still get there. What I am saying is that it's not impossible to have an industrial revolution without coal. Not that it's not hard.

We did that in preindustrial age. In total, it didn’t amount to that much energy.

We at most did things like run a mill on a river. Now compare the megawatt output of a proper modern hydroelectric project and say it isn't much energy. Imagine a society side stepping coalburning and going right to big hydro projects. Even something like a forest specifically grown and cultivated for energy is a relatively new idea, and doesn’t require any real technology even beyond understanding systems theory.

Big hydro requires ungodly amounts of reinforced concrete, labor (to dig millions of cubic meters on earth) and transportation capacity (gotta transport that concrete on site - hard to do with ox-powered carriages on unpaved roads). I can't see say Louis the XIV's France ever pulling that off.

Despite this, dams and other monumental architecture as well as complicated water management controls were built in ancient times all over the world.

A tree is a solar panel and battery storage all in one.

We've been using them in pre-industrial times. Their energy output was not high enough to start industrial revolution.