Similarly, utilities have to increase capacity to deal with increasing population, but building the additional capacity costs money. Someone has to cover the cost of the new equipment. The thing is, they're utilities. They don't exist to make their investors wealthy. They exist to serve their customers.

I'm sure it's preferred by lots of people who make buildings in order to sell them for a profit. ICF construction makes a better building, and lots of people and entities who plan to occupy the building they're constructing prefer it, even for buildings under 5 stories in CA.

It wasn't hard to find. I knew scientists could figure this out.

Here's something I haven't understood about that. It's my understanding that the most common death for people's pets in the USA is now euthanasia. Someone is making a drug that causes mammals to die an easy death and is allowing large quantities of it to be used for that purpose. Since the objective is death, who cares if the drug hasn't passed the regulatory hurdles that would allow it to be used to treat humans? I'm opposed to the death penalty, but as a practical matter, being unable to figure out how to humanely kill people in 2015 seems idiotic.

Better construction methods are available, and the cost/benefit ratio on building a house that is better in consideration of the infrastructure aspects is much better than it is building a house that is better in consideration of the decoration aspects.

I was thinking about linked community micro-grids when I was thinking about a situation where an accommodation couldn't be reached with the larger supplier, and I have a feeling that extra personal local politics would spring up and be a total PITA in a situation like that. I've been on the sidelines of some of the politics relating to Blue Lake Hydro in Sitka, AK and it's nothing fun.

Mine's ~$300/year, when I hassle my landlord into reading the meter, and I don't buy natural gas.

Couldn't the giant utility have a giant flywheel into which they dump any excess power during peak times? Then customer overproduction isn't such an issue, and the entire community benefits from having one large energy storage instead of thousands of small ones. If Japan can magnetically levitate their trains, surely Hawaii could manage to lift a big flywheel.

what about a massive, hazardous flywheel?

http://www.google.com/loon/where/

Also, filter out all the pages-of-links search spam
If you want to charge a fee, you could include a link to someone who is better at searching for stuff than I am, or maybe Watson.
Finally, include all the internet that Google hasn't indexed.

Have you seen this list of some of the few alternatives?

I did a little looking around to find out how much atmospheric moisture there is at 20km altitude, and it doesn't look like there's very much, especially away from the tropics.

I don't think Tim O'Reilly cares.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but Cheney's ties to Halliburton make a difference. Even as an adult understands the reason why a stove element glows red, anyone experienced in politics knows there needs to be a bidding process that will stand up to an ethics audit if you're thinking of giving a contract to an outfit that used to employ you in a management position. If they didn't have time for the bidding, one of the other two or three companies should have been picked.

I have it on good authority that a monopoly exists when a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. Google does not have a monopoly. Title Seven, Article 102 of the Lisbon Treaty addresses "a dominant position within the internal market or in a substantial part of it." A company doesn't have to have a monopoly to be subject to special extra regulation by the EU, just the largest percentage of market share.