[yxhuvud]

You are speaking centralized as in having one central unit for the building, are you not? I am speaking about having a big company, usually city-run, making the cool in a huge plant and then pump it out (in insulated pipes) to the rest of the city/town.

The heat version of it is very common here in Sweden (for towns bigger than, say, 10k people) and it is a lot more efficient (and therefore, cheaper) than having heating units in the different buildings. We even have bigger data centers selling their spare heat from their cooling back to the heating systems.

[closeparen]

Universities often have one or more chiller plants that cool multiple buildings on campus (also boiler plants).

Very large building-sized boiler and chiller plants served each half of my campus (probably less than a square mile in total). I'm not sure it would work at city scale.

[pinot]

It's called District Cooling

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_cooling

[nerdshoe]

Deep lake cooling is used in Toronto, Canada, though not widespread, and is offered by a private company. http://enwavetoronto.com/district_cooling_system.html