Also something interesting to note about Russia is hot water is provided by the municipality and not through a hot water tank in your own apartment like in North America. This would certainly reduce heating costs per person by offsetting them to the state.
> This would certainly reduce heating costs per person by offsetting them to the state.
Unless municipal hot water is somehow much more efficient than hot water heaters (and I'm skeptical, given the heat lost in transit), then it doesn't offset the costs per person, because those costs still have to be paid.
The main reason it can be more efficient is that they use waste heat from power plants.
In principle you can do the same thing at a smaller scale. Instead of burning natural gas or diesel/home heating oil in a furnace, burn it in a generator and heat your house with the engine coolant.
Correct. Here for example you can see a pipeline running superheated water at ~120 C (250 F) 8 miles from the fourth-largest coal power plant in the world (5 GW) to a medium size city:
The plant generates so much waste heat (around 10 GW) while generating electricity that the heat loss in transport is pretty much irrelevant, as the heat is free anyway from the power plant's point of view.
You can use heat from burning garbage as well. My town has an incinerator which burns garbage at high temperatures, the heat is used to warm water which is used to heat buildings (as far as I know not as hot water directly).
