Then, I learned that USA has near no cogeneration, and district heating + detached house living with mostly terrible insulation. Most North American apartments are no better, with most highrises looking like radiators.
I’ll never forget my first big winter storm thinking I was going to die of heat stroke because I had to shut the windows to keep the snow from blowing in. Some people on my floor would leave their window unit air conditioners in year-round to counteract the heat.
It was so wasteful and almost no one in the building had a comfortable temperature in their apartment all because it was cheaper/easier for management to just keep burning a ton of oil instead of investing in a bit of insulation.
Afterwards, I moved to a nicer but even older building where the landlord had bothered to retrofit a modern boiler with separate heating zones for the different apartments. Crucially, the radiators had new control valves the lines had modern insulation. It was like night and day. I think the retrofit cost over $10k, so like you said, the path of least resistance is often crappy heat.
Dan Holohan, for those interested. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18430512
Making old housing stock efficient at scale is fundamentally incompatible with the laws in MA (local as well as state) that make it possible to both make incremental improvements as budget allows and be on the right side of the law.
People suffer through expensive old utility systems because they can't do X without hiring a licenses pro who can't do Y without pulling a permit and the town won't grant a permit for Y unless Z that has to be touched do do Y is brought up to modern code at the same time which would be fundamentally incompatible (usually for cost reasons) with the goal of the work.
Incremental improvement is more or less disallowed by law or at least massively dis-incentivized. You either have the cash to completely renovate a building and put all new everything in or you do nothing.
In the case of my first apartment though I know for a fact my landlord had more than enough cash to update the building if she wanted to - her husband owns the Red Sox.
Also, appartment buildings are far easier to heat, not to mention a lot of soviet era appartments only have communical heating available. Which basically means the heating gets turned on in oktober for entire city/appartment blocks, Some of those don't even have the option to change the temperate/flow.
In Russia, it's most likely an inverse of venue class. Malls, public venues, indoor markets, govt buildings all like to save on ventilation.
With slightly open windows, you're losing a bunch of heat for very little ventilation.
Many buildings in Denmark are supplied with heat (for room heating and hot water) by a municipal system, but each house or apartment can adjust the temperature of the room heating, with radiator valves or electronic thermostats.
We're charged based on how much heat we extract from the system.
Unless municipal hot water is somehow much more efficient than hot water heaters (and I'm skeptical, given the heat lost in transit), then it doesn't offset the costs per person, because those costs still have to be paid.
In principle you can do the same thing at a smaller scale. Instead of burning natural gas or diesel/home heating oil in a furnace, burn it in a generator and heat your house with the engine coolant.
https://goo.gl/maps/VmaFQrrX5VvRKFdu6
The plant generates so much waste heat (around 10 GW) while generating electricity that the heat loss in transport is pretty much irrelevant, as the heat is free anyway from the power plant's point of view.