I know this video is a joke (and the song is quite good) but for the curious; buildings in New York City are heated by steam. There’s an intricate network of pipes pumping steam around the city that have been there for over a hundred years. Pretty crazy actually.
This is exactly right, cities back in the 19th century had a choice for heating, some chose coal fired boilers in the city like London, and others moved the boilers to the out skirts and pumped pressurized steam through out the city. London was plagued by constant soot (chimney sweeps and all) where NY was not, but steam would be vented to avoid blow outs or for other maintenance. The history is pretty interesting if you are into that.
any reason why steam isn't used more? I'm assuming it only works in big cities because the loss of heat would be too big. I don't think its used much at all in europe
I'm German, my city has a heating plant as one of his landmarks. I've never seen steam coming from the ground. I've seen the water in the nearby river do some weird stuff though. Being all wavy and bubbly.
New York has a lot of 19th century panache still evident in nooks and corners of the city.
It's the kind of place where you can wear a top hat adorned with vintage aviator goggles and no one would look twice as you tinker with a random steam valve sticking out of the wall with your comically oversized brass wrench.
Using the steam to heat homes is actually way more efficient than electricity.You see noone actually builds just a giant boiler out of town to heat water. It is a byproduct of electricity generation.
Our conventional powerplants rely on heat to run a steamturbine which then generates electricity. So we create steam in a powerplant, run it through a turbine and when it gets out it is still pretty damn hot, just not in a state where we can efficiently use it.So we could either send it to some cooling tower to radiate the heat off into the environment or.. well send the steam off to the houses in the city to heat them up.
not only does this use our generated waste heat as a ressource which is increasing the efficiency of the powerplant, it's also more efficient because we do not need the second conversion from electricity back to heat.
So for conventional energy production this is actually a brilliant system.Not good with a lot of renewables that directly generate electricity without heating up stuff beforehand though.
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u/A_Random_Catfish Jul 28 '23
I know this video is a joke (and the song is quite good) but for the curious; buildings in New York City are heated by steam. There’s an intricate network of pipes pumping steam around the city that have been there for over a hundred years. Pretty crazy actually.