District Heating

OASIS CITIES ARE THE IDEAL PLATFORM FOR DISTRICT HEATING

Most of us would be shocked to learn that most thermal power stations are only about 40% efficient – meaning they waste an incredible 60% of their fuel…!!!

We have all driven past power stations and noticed huge clouds of steam being emitted from the ubiquitous “cooling towers”. But we usually don’t stop to reflect that not only does this steam contribute to GW/CC – it also represents an enormous potential power resource.

District Heating has long been enthusiastically parroted by greenies and now, in the wake of the energy crisis, has begun to be taken seriously as a possible alternative to noisy and expensive heat pumps which are only suitable for houses with outside space. Such systems are quite widely used in Scandinavia to heat homes and/or water using waste heat from power stations or other industrial plants. But, unless such plants already exist, and are close to large apartment blocks, it seems expensively impractical since distributing the heat requires a convoluted network of miles of insulated piping. And who lives – or wants to live – close to a power station, especially a nuclear-powered one..?

Over-simplistic diagram illustrating how district heating works.

Although piping this (otherwise wasted) heat into homes is a nice idea in principle, much of the heat must still be lost to the atmosphere and even more is lost in transmission because power stations and other heat-emitting sources tend to be quite distant from residential buildings.

Here is a small section of these “MILES OF INSULATED PIPES”. I would imagine the heat loss to be very substantial.

Waste Heat Recovery
Buildings and the people within them generate a lot of heat, but much of this is lost through leakage or deliberate discharge – for example hot water from baths, showers, kitchen sinks, dishwashers, washing machines, etc. Although it is theoretically possible to recover and utilise this “waste heat”, installing such technology into small buildings like private houses is highly uneconomical. It seems that “Waste Heat Recovery” is just another of those much vaunted “green building solutions”, parroted by environmentalist groups, which would only make economic sense in very large buildings.