The author clearly understands the primary energy fallacy and yet deploys it anyway because it suits his purposes, then excuses himself by saying demand will grow anyway. Well that demand would grow under fossil use too and is irrelevant to the primary energy fallacy.
The discussion in comments about his figures for steel use makes a similar accusation.
I like his site and enjoy reading it but he regularly lets himself down when evaluating renewables, presumably because he wants to enforce "low tech" approaches (though electric arc furnaces appear to have been grandfathered in given this articles conclusion) rather than pursue low carbon or any other goal via whatever technology works best.
The discussion in comments about his figures for steel use makes a similar accusation.
I like his site and enjoy reading it but he regularly lets himself down when evaluating renewables, presumably because he wants to enforce "low tech" approaches (though electric arc furnaces appear to have been grandfathered in given this articles conclusion) rather than pursue low carbon or any other goal via whatever technology works best.