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District heating (less commonly called '''teleheating''') is a system for distributing heat generated in a centralized location for residential and commercial heating requirements. The heat is often obtained from a Cogeneration plant, although dedicated facilities called Heat-only Boiler Stations are also used. A district heating plant can provide higher efficiencies and better pollution control than localized boilers. In most Russia n cities, district-level Heating and Electricity Stations () produce more than 50% of the nation's electricity and simultaneously provide hot water for neighboring city blocks. They mostly use Coal and Oil -powered Steam Turbine s for cogeneration of heat. Now, Gas Turbine s and Combined Cycle designs are beginning to be widely used as well. A Soviet -era approach of using very large central stations to heat large districts of a big city or entire small cities is fading away as due to inefficiency, much heat is lost in transportation Tube s because of Leakage s and lack of proper Thermal Insulation . Scandinavia n homes also use district heating for their hot water and heating needs. In the United Kingdom , district heating also became popular after World War 2 , but on a restricted scale, to heat the large residential estates that replaced areas devastated by the Blitz . The photo (right) shows the accumulator for one such plant at Pimlico , just north of the River Thames . This once relied on hot waste water from the now-disused Battersea Power Station on the far shore of the river. It is still in operation, the water now being heated locally. Many other such heating plants still operate on estates across Britain. Though they are said to be efficient, a frequent complaint of residents is that the heating levels are often set too high - the original designs did not allow for individual users to have their own Thermostat s. In Italy , district heating is used in some town ( Bergamo , Brescia , Reggio Emilia ). In The system has operated continuously since March 1882 and serves Manhattan Island from the Battery through 96th Street. In addition to providing space and water heating, steam from the system is used in numerous restaurants for food preparation, process heat in laundries and dry cleaners, as well as to power Absorption Chiller s for Air Conditioning . HISTORY District heating traces its roots to the hot water-heated baths and greenhouses of the ancient Roman Empire . District systems gained prominence in Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance , with one system in France in continuous operation since the 14th Century . Across the Atlantic, the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis began Steam district heating service in 1853 . Although these and numerous other systems have operated over the centuries, the first commercially successful district heating system was launched in Lockport , N.Y. , in 1877 by American hydraulic engineer Birdsill Holly , considered the founder of modern district heating. The future of many of these systems are in doubt; the same kind of problems many district heating operations in former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have today, many North American steam district heating systems began to experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. In North America at the time, the owner in many cases power utilities, lost complete interest in the district heating business and did not provide sufficient funding for maintenance of the systems. They started to deteriorate and the service to the customer became low quality. The result was that after some years the systems started to lose customers; the reliability for heat supply went down and finally the whole system closed down. For example in Minnesota in the 1950s there were about 40 district steam systems, today only a few remain. {Link without Title} SEE ALSO EXTERNAL LINKS
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