231–240 of 307 posts
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By German standards that's still poor insulation. In winter in Leipzig the district heating pipes have snow sitting on them.
Great. How much energy do you spend clearing paths?
As an American it completely breaks my expectations that district heating not only works can be more efficient that decentralized heating. The amount of heat lost just moving water from the water heater on one side of the house to the shower on the other is ridiculously high in houses here. The idea that you can insulate well enough to efficiently move heat across a city is amazing to me.
For USA, district heating made sense in the coal power era. Today, why burn natural gas at a central plant and then have to manage a complex steam distribution network with associated losses when you can simply distribute natural gas instead and get 98% AFUE at the point of use? Even better is a heat pump with gas backup at point of use. Triumph of technology. Also, You dont really insulate the steam distribution pip…
- efficiency of gas heaters, both with tanks and without, is definitely not 98%. Only the most modern condensing boilers can achieve over 90% efficiency, and the utter majority of heating systems are old clunkers [2].
- a central plant can/has to install exhaust and condensate filtering systems, whereas decentral heaters just pipe their exhaust into the environment
- gas lines are a massive fire and explosion risk
- decentralized heaters that are based on burning anything are carbon monoxide risks - in Germany alone, it's usual to have a dozen people or more die due to CM poisoning by a defective heater [3] each year.
- a district heating system can be adapted to different fuels (anything from trash over oil to gas or geothermal energy can be used), whereas a switch of the heat source is completely out of the question in a decentralized system (which is a real big issue here in Europe at the moment, as alone in Germany half the heat is generated by gas burners [4])
- a central plant can also use energy to power electricity generators, thereby improving total efficiency
> You dont really insulate the steam distribution pipes
Of course we do. Right around the corner where I live there is a centralized heating in construction, and these pipes are heavily insulated.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condensing_boiler
[2] https://www.effizienzhaus-online.de/zwei-drittel-aller-heizu...
[3] https://www.focus.de/immobilien/wohnen/wohnen-13-tote-durch-...
[4] https://www.bmwi-energiewende.de/EWD/Redaktion/Newsletter/20...
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Traditionally when using combustion plants the great advantage in nordic countries comes from CHP (combined heat and power), you can extract much more energy from the fuel this way vs having separate electricity and heat plants. But yep great insulation in the network is a requirement.
i have been thinking about getting a solar water heater>heat pump>radiator to warm up my home but the costs just dont make sense because of the heat pump. i am told the life expectancy of a good heatpump is like 10 years, that amount divided by only 10 winters it is expected to see is more than what we currently pay for electricity in winters, accepting that we don't currently have whole house heating, (we rely on pe…
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By German standards that's still poor insulation. In winter in Leipzig the district heating pipes have snow sitting on them.
Sometimes this is intentional to keep paths clear. Idaho is much colder than Leipzig in winter.
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More people live in New York than in the whole of Finland.
You can sort of tell from the other responses, but really the core of this argument is not the one you think it is: You think this means it is less appropriate for New York because of this fact. It is the opposite. Your population density is higher, so these types of solutions are easier and more cost-effective. This makes the fact that you don't already have it seem even more incompetent, which is the opposite of wh…
I know it's hard to develop actual efficient solutions due to the cost of buying land, creating new infra. So you go for the cost efficient route instead of the practical efficiency.
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By German standards that's still poor insulation. In winter in Leipzig the district heating pipes have snow sitting on them.
Great. How much energy do you spend clearing paths?
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Many American universities use district heating for the whole campus. Also, as made famous by the many steam vents in NYC movie shots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_steam_system . More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_heating#United_States
From finnish point of view, those seem small. In finnish, the term is ”kaukolämpö”, literally ”far heat”. You dont heat a ”district”, you heat the entire city. I mean, electricity wires go everywhere, why not heating pipes. And so the network for Helsinki looks like this: https://twitter.com/energiahelen/status/1511998227008176129?... The red lines is the heat pipe network, it covers the entire city. When Americans t…
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By German standards that's still poor insulation. In winter in Leipzig the district heating pipes have snow sitting on them.
Sometimes this is intentional to keep paths clear. Idaho is much colder than Leipzig in winter.
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/germany/leipzig/climate
https://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/moscow/climate
though Moscow gets rather more snow