Is Cornell paying a tax to use Cayuga lake as a heat dump?

I toured the Lake Source Cooling project's (http://www.utilities.cornell.edu/utl_ldlsc.html) facility a few years ago. The project's director said that the amount of heat added to the lake in one year was roughly equal to the heat absorbed by the lake in 7 seconds of sunshine. Which, if I recall from my time in Ithaca, is roughly twice the amount of annual sunshine.

There's problems with every method of power generation - they all remove energy from the environment.

And then they put energy (in the form of heat) back into the environment. The only exception is the energy that results in light and other electromagnetic energy, which of course can escape the earth.

Beats hauling around a bulky CPE device and WiFi router everywhere.

Did you RTFA? The article says it's similar to a triple-thick credit card. Or are you comparing the device your company makes to some heretofore unmentioned piece of hardware?

The only downside is that WiMax coverage isn't in many markets yet.

That's no small downside. The article you linked to says, "One big constraint, of course, is that WiMax from Sprint/Clearwire is currently limited to Baltimore and Portland, OR, but is growing this year and next to many cities." Two markets is hardly worth mentioning.