[VLM]

Compressed liquid refrigerant is very expensive compared to cheap water for heating. Long pipes full of liquid would be very expensive to initially fill not to mention after leaks. And there would be leaks...

Historically most refrigerants have had "issues" when leaked either environmental or being toxic or otherwise it minimizes danger to keep as little as possible. Even if we could afford to use 1000x as much refrigerant with a central compressor station, it would be bad for the environment to use it that way.

You can move a huge amount of heat with water pressurized to merely 14 psi or so, but I have a puron aka R-410A conditioner at home and that dude runs near 400 psi on a hot day and its difficult to run miles of high pressure pipe.

I'm not sure bigger compressors are that much more efficient than smaller compressors, taking into account the environmental and economic expense of the pipes.

From an engineering standpoint its cheaper safer and less environmentally destructive to push kilowatts thru copper wire than push high pressure expensive refrigerant thru long high pressure pipes if all other things were equal which they mostly are.

[pinot]

You do not have to distribute the compressor gasses- you just pump cold water/glycol around. Every factory everywhere does it this way for distributed cooling, as well as hospitals/colleges/corp campuses with central plants.

For a long while, Stanford had an underground reservoir of ice for even better cooling (freeze ice at night when electrical prices are low, melt off during the day) http://web.stanford.edu/dept/news/news/1999/april21/iceplant...

[Ajedi32]

Why would you need to use the refrigerant itself for heat transfer from end users? Couldn't you just use water for that; like they do for central heating? (E.g. Chill water using centralized AC, then pump the cold water through pipes to cool homes and businesses?)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Why would you use long pipes of refrigerant? Move the air, not the refrigerant. Plenty of existing central heating systems do that (no radiators, just vents in each room). Systems like this already exist and work rather well.