> As for this error:
>   Fatal Python error: Py_Initialize: Unable to get the locale encoding
>   LookupError: no codec search functions registered: can't find encoding
> 
> It seems to me that this error appears if the path passed to
> Py_SetPath does not point to a valid python lib folder.

Indeed, it does. The error message could perhaps get improved.
What Python does is try to find the current locale's encoding in the
"encodings" package and load it. If it can't find it, it assumes that's
because the encoding is unknown, not because the path is wrong.