Under the conditions that the Lowtech Magazine article is suggesting these thermoelectic generators would be useful, a steam engine/generator combo would perhaps be prohibitively expensive for an impoverished area to afford, except maybe through a group purchase where it becomes a central power supply for an entire village, but at that point they may as well instead do the solar microgrids, which would require a lot less time and effort to keep fueled, and probably cost less overall.

I think the other primitivism blog guy would be against the use of a fossil fuel powered anything. I'm not actually sure what level of technology he would be okay with.