Comment by quickthrowman

16 hours ago

District heating and chilled water is uneconomical for single-family homes. It does work well in medium to high density areas.

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quickthrowman

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gambiting  16 hours ago

I don't know how economical that is, but just as an anecdote - the town I'm from in Poland has district heating to all single family homes, town of about 20k people. And coincidentally, I now live in the UK and a new estate near me has district heating to all the houses they are building, not apartment blocks. So it must make some sense to someone, or they wouldn't be outfitting 100+ houses this way.

  • quickthrowman  3 hours ago

    It’s uneconomical in an already built out area or a non central planned economy, and also the US is special case since we have dirt cheap natural gas that is used for heating.

    Digging up streets to run distribution lines, running service drops to every existing house, installing a heat exchanger and valves in every house is astronomically expensive given the amount of energy used by a single residence.

    If you’re building out a new neighborhood on a greenspace plot, installing the district heating/cooling piping is much cheaper since you’re already laying electric, water, sewer, and mane gas lines.

  • hunterpayne  14 hours ago

    "I don't know how economical that is"

    Sure you do. Think about it. Its just drilling a hole and making electricity from the heat. We have been able to do this for a very long time. So if people aren't really doing it much, its not economical. If it was now becoming economical, the article would describe some new way of doing it that makes it economical. The article doesn't, so you "know" it isn't.

    PS This has been tried many time, it only works in very specific situations, usually places where building a full PP doesn't make sense or where you are making a lot of electricity for some other purpose (mining usually).