3 ms·

I wonder if this could be scaled up to provide district heating for villages and small towns.

• bluGill 8y ago
  They discuss this: yes but small is key here. It doesn't scale to large towns much less a city. (though if you take each neighborhood separately...) Losses from transmission are high.
  • jacobush 8y ago
    But no? It says small city. In my town we have residential heating for 100k people. It's a power plant dumping all of it's heat into the hot water grid. (Co-generation.) If there were windmills, at the power plant, or really just along the heat distribution waterworks, they could dump their heat into the hot water grid.
    • bluGill 8y ago
      Presumably your small city is using waste heat, so efficiency isn't as important: the goal is electric and the heat is just waste heat that needs to be dumped anyway. When there isn't the co-generation involved efficiency matters more. Note too that nobody has defined the actual size. Your idea of a small town could be larger than my idea of a large city. Local factors matter in this definition as well.