Local Heat and Power Systems

Over at Spiked something about Ken's plans for energy and heating in London.

Every London neighbourhood will have a municipal waste incinerator, a couple of sawdust-burning furnaces or a gigantic sewage reservoir bubbling methane and other flammable gases. Roads and parks will be dug up to lay an entirely new system of hot water distribution to homes and offices that, in turn, will be re-plumbed. Thousands of combined heat and power plants – each the size of a small block of flats – will take over from central gas and electricity as the main suppliers of energy to the city.

Such a wonderful idea, eh (Rob Johnston does a pretty good job of pointing out some flaws but not all of them)?

You see, these things have in fact been tried already: it's the standard manner that heat and hot water are provided to cities in Russia (and I think to most other E. European places as well). And as anyone who has lived in such places will point out to you, there's one really rather major problem: maintenance.

Over the years in Moscow we came to dread the one month a year that we had no hot water: heating wasn't a problem, for maintenance was always done in the summer. But no hot water for a month? For an entire swathe of the city, meaning you couldn't drop in on a neighbour while your own boiler was serviced (because, of course, you didn't have a boiler)?

There's also another point: given that you have to have the water flowing all the time in the heating pipes there is no way to control the temperature in an individual dwelling, nor any manner of changing it according to whether the day is warmer than normal or not. Other, that is, than opening the window.

So a bright winter's day in Moscow sees windows thrown open, for the heating system is still going full blast (as it does from October to March) and that's the only way you can stop yourself sweating to death: by heating the atmosphere.

It just doesn't sound like all that fabulous a manner of beating climate change now, does it?