District Heating and Cooling
Thermal energy delivered to a building from an outside source is known as district heating and cooling, which can range in size from small systems serving two or three buildings to networks serving entire cities. District heating and cooling is widely used in developed countries throughout the world and offers numerous advantages over individual building apparatus, including greater safety and reliability, reduced emissions, and greater fuel flexibility, particularly in using alternative fuels such as biomass or waste.
The earliest examples of district heating were Roman hypocausts, a type of hot-air furnace often adapted to warm several buildings in close proximity, such as the three temples at Carnutum (Vienna). The hypocaust and other Roman technologies were reintroduced during the Renaissance, serving primarily as starting points for improvements. Meanwhile, city fathers in Chaudes Aigues, a small town in the volcanic Cantal region of southern France, had by 1322 levied a tax on several houses heated by a natural hot spring channeled through open trenches dug in the rock. The history of this system, which still operates warming 150 residences, includes the introduction of wooden pipe, later replaced by plastic conduits. Accounts of this system appeared in numerous architectural works and may have been the inspiration for the proposed introduction of district heating in London in 1622 by Dutch polymath Cornelius Drebbel.
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