District Cooling

District cooling is the cooling counterpart of district heating, distributing chilled water from a central plant to nearby offices, factories and other buildings instead of each building running its own air conditioning. Some systems draw on cold seawater in winter as a cheaper cooling source than electric compressors, others use heat pump networks to move heat out of buildings and into a shared ground temperature loop, and the newest, so called fifth generation systems supply heating and cooling together by recycling the waste heat their chillers produce for space heating or hot water. District cooling networks operate today in Canada, France, Finland, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Qatar, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates and the United States, with the earliest of these national systems dating to the 1970s, making it an established alternative to conventional building by building air conditioning.