LA Times: Reporting from Independence, Calif. — It puts out enough electricity to light 250,000 homes and generates a large portion of the tax revenue that funds school districts, a hospital and emergency response in rural Inyo County, east of the cresting Sierra Nevada. With its own wells in decline, Coso Operating Co.’s geothermal plant was granted a county permit Wednesday to pump water from an aquifer that nourishes a 50-year-old private hunting club, Little Lake Ranch, and its spring-fed …