My employer has a campus similar in size to a midsize university, which formerly used district steam heating from a central boiler plant. About a decade ago it

My employer has a campus similar in size to a midsize university, which formerly used district steam heating from a central boiler plant. About a decade ago it was decided that moving to a modern distributed system with a natural gas boiler in each building would net better energy and cost efficiency, and while the transition took several years and was fairly disruptive in terms of the construction in each building, it's ended up delivering as promised. I just don't think central heating has the advantages today it used to, unless you're in the unusual situation that you have a "free" source of steam (e.g. from process equipment). The boilers used now are compact, low maintenance, and have impressive remote management features. The "steam plant" staff here went from a dozen operating a building to a computer workstation at the facilities operations desk for remote monitoring and a few roving maintenance technicians. We are also currently transitioning from a central standby power plant to generators located at each building. This is being done for almost the exact same reasons - the generators today are small, low cost, perform testing and exercise automatically, and are remotely monitored.