Have you worked out how much energy could be got from stream? Is it enough to run house / heat pump/water heating and sell rest back to the power company?
I would gravity feed water to large thermal mass (wall or floor ) in large flow and control flow through restricting (tap) for cooling.
And some heating with wood of course.
I have a whole packet of information about selling powerback to the electric company. They make it pretty hard. First off, they will not buy any electricity I can produce, instead they want to give energy credits and bank them for any of my future use of their power. So no actual money ever changes hands, unless I owe them of course.
Second, the electric company pretty much wants full control of how much electricy I can produce and how I do it. Third, the power company also wants control of how I design my home. Of course they also want me to pay them for for all their designs and If I dont follow there design plans, they wont allow me to connect to their grid. I can see the need for some regulations on who sells power back to the company, and I understand the whole safety issue. I also believe that their involment in the design of my power system stops where I connect to their pole. As long as I produce power in the proper configuration to match what they produce, and as long as there are safety devices in place to prevent back feeding the lines in the event their workers have to work on their own systems, then what I do and how I do it is none of their business. Its just much more simpler to forget the whole net metering thing and trying to sell the electric company any excess power I might produce.
As to how much power my own hydrosystem can produce, this is pretty much limited to how much I am willing to spend up front. I have 75ft of head and I can easily pull a 4inch pipe worth of water from the stream without messing up the steam flow and water quality. A generator and turbine that can handle that amount of flow will produce a significant amount of power, but also can cost a pretty penney. I dont plan on even trying to power my whole house with my hydrosystem. Things like my cook stove, clothes dryer, well pump, hot water heater, and heatpump, will all be grid tied and I plan on a battery storage system for backup. As I can afford to expand my electrical produceing and storage capacities, I can wean myself from the power company. Solar water heaters and using cold water for cooling is just one step in reduceing the amount of power I will have to buy from the power company.
Producing power with hydro instead of sunlite has its advantages. For one thing, hydro is 24/7 where as solar depends on sunny days. This means you can get by with a lot less storage capacity. Less storage means less dollars. The disadvantage is you have to locate the hydrosystem close to the water source. This means running wires a long way, unless you build next to the creek. You lose a lot of DC power by running long electric lines. This usually means running AC power from the hydro system to the house and then rectifying it to DC to charge your batteries and then inverting it back to AC to power your house or sell back to a power company. That is a lot of equipment to buy and maintain.