[joe_mamba]

>The former USSR countries are known for doing this on the scale of entire cities.

Not today anymore. In my warsaw-pact country, my parents and most of the city residents cut themselves off from district hating since the 2000 and installed natural gas heaters/boilers in their apartments, which is what most people in my city use to this day.

It's because the former commie district heating was incredibly wasteful and inefficient in the post commie era, making it cheaper and more convenient to have you own apartment heating.

Probably the same thing would happen with heat pumps in apartments now, if air-to-air heat pumps could produce enough heat in cold winters.

[cyberax]

District heating worked really well with coal/gas power plants because the waste heat was essentially free. But the infrastructure for heat transmission was costly and required constant maintenance. I did calculations for district/distributed heating costs professionally in mid 2000s, and back then they were about even.

The engineering culture in the USSR was also quite poor, so it was easier to build one steam/heat plant rather than hundreds of individual water heaters.