While true, it's mostly pedantic. OP is talking about a potential earthquake harvesting power plant. So generating in this sense means releasing the trigger, in the same way that burning coal is generating energy. It's just releasing the stored chemical energy of the coal, but we still say that coal powerplants generate energy.
No, they managed to fracture enough rock to destablize the system and allow the fault to slip and release the energy it had built up over decades.
In effect, this pulled the trigger. The energy was in the action, which was cocked by the earth.