Following on from the boiler thread ...

Sorta like

I think the barrier is NIMBYs who don't want a power plant in their neighbourhood. No doubt we would not be thinking of the children.

Jon

Ask the Bretton area of Peterborough. They tried it in the early 70's, about 3 or 4 huge boilers proudly displayed within a glass-fronted building in Sainsbury's car park to heat 5000 homes. Rather than turn down the TRVs on radiators, people just opened the windows and after a few years the scheme was shut down.

In the 1950's they did just that. The 'enormous' furnace was Battersea Power Station, and the waste heat was used to heat parts of Pimlico. Although all that is left of BPS is the shell of the building, the system still exists, apparently, and has recently been extended, and now provides heating and hot water services to 3,256 homes, 50 commercial premises and three schools in the area.

See

Try doing a little Googling. In Iceland they have huge amounts of geothermal energy available so there is no fuel cost. Area heating like you suggest is available in large areas of New York but in todays market no new scheme would be considered.

Malmo in Sweden?

They have communal boilers at various flats around Manchester. The water is heated in one place and piped round the blocks. Vertical villages are easier perhaps to install this sort of thing at.

I remember seeing some roadworks for expansion of the Nottingham scheme a year or two ago, it gets its heat from a waste incinerator, generates power and distributes heating

But that's just a function of the energy not being metered. It's not inherent in the system. These days, there are meters that would take care of that problem.

Indeed and EnviroEnergy, that I mentioned later, develop and supply heat energy meters to other schemes.

It also happens in Denmark - at least SOME council flats are heated by waste burners whch also supply electricity.

This is of course a problem with the wind mill brigade, who complain that these things cant be switched off at times of high wind, and so want them scrapped....so they can achieve higher 'renewable targets'

domestic burning of fuels is actually pretty efficient - the lower efficiencies compared with industrial scale boilers are soon outweighed by heat losses in long pipes..

Domestic nuclear boilers/steam generators would be actually brilliant.

If they were allowed.

With modern boiler efficiencies in the 90%+ range it may not be that clear cut. You are then in effect comparing the cost of boiler against the cost of the shared infrastructure to pipe and meter the shared heat

- there is a fair chance a boiler is cheaper.

These schemes certainly makes sense where there is a large supply of free energy going begging - say left over from industrial processes, or from incineration of waste, although that then requires your industrial process plant to be located close to residential properties.

There's been a big one in Pimlico for many years. Go past it on the train. The link is faulty right now but look here and scroll down to United Kingdom:

And of course to make sure efficiency is resonable, you'd need very good insulation of the supply pipes. Then presumably some form of heat exchanger in every house to provide the domestic hot water? And the central boiler system would need a backup.

Is all of that going to be cheaper than a local boiler with a simple gas supply?

In colder climes, they can get an extra benefit, by using the residual heat in the return pipes for road and pavement heating.

Chris

Right. I'd not say that's a sensible way of using energy.

Not uncommon in UK post-war council housing, and still in use in some tower blocks ('district heating'). The 'windows open-heat on full' syndrome is an issue, but not a decent reason for not doing it. I blame Thatcher ;-)

Cheers, Rob

Sadly it is - and all too common where something is provided 'free'. Adding a method of charging individual houses for the energy used - rather than a flat rate - would add considerably to the cost.

It's a different matter where waste heat is used - like the scheme from Battersea power station.

oddly enough in a power station context, its one way of getting exhaust temperatures down instead of cooling towers..

And, in fact, way back in CEGB days, power station engineers were very keen to find ways to use the large amount of low grade waste heat. But, unlike (say) Germany and countries further north or east we only need heating for a third of the year, not half the year. This shifts the economics given the amount of capital investment required. And a lot more of the mainland population lives in flats. For technical reasons doubtless well covered in Google, the Battersea district heating system was not very successful and was eventually powered by dedicated boilers, rather than "waste heat". One of the later 2000 MW sites experimented with heating greenhouses for tomatoes, but I don't think that was particularly successful either.

Think you'll find such schemes in Siberia:

"Power Generation:

Irkutsk indeed deserves the right to be called one of Russia's largest power generation centers. Irkutsk hydroelectric power generation plant is located within the city's bounds providing 660 MW of power. Novoirkutskaya heat-and-power generation plant only yields a fraction producing 655 MW of power. Net annual electric power generation by these two plants is in excess of 6 billion kWh. Both of the enterprises are part of ?Irkutskenergo?, which also includes the following hydro and heat electric power generation facilities: 3 hydroelectric power generation stations, 9 heat-and-power generation plants, electric and heat transmission networks. ?Irkutskenergo? holds the second place in Russia in terms of heat production and the third place in electric power generation. Thanks to having a set of hydroelectric power stations on the Angara river, the price of energy produced in Irkutsk is much lower than that produced by nuclear power plants."