this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Some Scandinavian cities have a centralized heating system where a plant is heating water in pipes via geothermal and the pipes are ran to every building in the city. This way not every building has to have its own heat source
Yeah, district heating is very common in Scandinavia. We're pioneers in the technology.
Here in Stockholm, we have a wide variety of heat sources, including natural gas, biomass, geothermal, air-source heat pump, and trash incineration. We even had nuclear heat at one point. Some cities also have factory and datacenter waste heat. We also have systems that use winter lake water for cooling in the summer.
Speaking as USian, this sounds amazing.
It's very nice. The best thing is that most of the heat is generated inside electric co-generation plants. They take normal combustion power plants and send the turbine waste into the district heating network for better efficiency and free heating. Basically achieving over 100% efficiency.
Wikipedia says about half of swedish homes are heated with district heating, with 580 networks nationwide.
I believe some cities and universities in the US have district heating, most notably New York City, but much of it runs on old school steam pipes instead of the insulated water pipes we have in Scandinavia.
I do think this is something that requires more density than most American suburbs have, unfortunately. Single family homes just don't have the density to make district heating economically viable unless they're close by to row-houses/apartments. You only see district heating in cities that have at least some apartment buildings here in Sweden.
This is what my apartmentbuilding uses, works well.