District cooling: flip side of an old innovation - Gulf News

The company recently began construction of Qatar's first cooling scheme to provide affordable chilled water to a large residential area, the official said.

District heating (source)

On March 5, 1889, the Edison Electric Light Company of Philadelphia began to generate and sell electricity from its new central station at 908 Sansom Street. Later that same year, exhaust steam from the plant's engines was used to warm the nearby Irving House at 917 Walnut Street, creating an additional source of revenue that required very little cost. This was the start of what is now the third largest district heating system in the United States (New York and Indianapolis are 1 and 2, respectively). Edison companies in Kansas City, Boston, Rochester, and Indianapolis also began steam service in 1889 and each, like Philadelphia's, continue to supply steam through underground pipes to their respective downtown areas, though only the systems in Indianapolis is still owned by an electric utility. This practice became widepsread, so that by World War I more than 350 commercial district heating systems were operating in the United States, all but a handful operated in combination with electric generating stations. While forty of these early commercial systems still operate, another sixty have since been placed into operation. Another 6,000 systems serve college campuses, government and military installations, and other institutions. Commercial district heating is even more widely used in Europe, with more than half of the buildings in Denmark connected to central heating plants, and more than 800 Russian cities are heated in this manner.