Running a moving company, I've had clients disappear after a job too... now I stash 20% of every payment into a separate account before I even touch the rest. It covers slow months and those surprise expenses that always pop up. Makes the stress way more manageable when you know it's there.

Take that pumped storage idea and push it further though, because even the smartest engineering can get wrecked by stuff outside the project fence. Honestly, you can monitor all the watershed data you want but if an upstream farmer starts diverting more water or a logging operation clears a hillside, your entire flow calculation is garbage. A lot of these secluded projects fail by only looking at their own creek bed instead of the whole hydrological picture and who else might need that water. Tbh the most innovative sustainability thing isn't just the turbine tech, it's building a system resilient enough to handle both nature's changes and other people's choices.