This makes such good sense

The residents of this city know about winter only too well. But fewer than one in 10 homes here has a furnace.
No, it's not because the Swedes like freezing in the dark. The reason is district heating.
It's hardly a new concept — even in Toronto it exists — but the difference is one of scale. More than 90 per cent of apartments and houses in this city, the second largest in Sweden, are on district heating. And that number is growing all the time.
'We built the system during the past 30 years,' says Lars Holmquist, an analyst with Goteborg Energi, a city-owned corporation that operates the power grid and the district heating system.
'The direct advantage of district heating is that we don't have to use fossil fuels. District heating is the main reason why Sweden has reduced CO2 emissions while the rest of the world has increased.
'We have achieved a 99 per cent reduction in sulphur emissions from 1973 to 2005, a 90 per cent reduction in NO2 and a 50 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions.'
Instead of furnaces, Swedes have heat converters. Houses and apartment buildings are connected to underground pipes that circulate hot water throughout the system.
The water is warmed through a variety of means. In Gothenburg, one-quarter comes from an incineration plant that burns local waste.
'We can also use low-grade energy sources that no one else would want,' Holmquist explains. 'We take the heat from waste water and industrial processes.'
That means steel mills, automobile manufacturing plants and the like.
"If you have to burn something, you might as well use the heat that's generated and the energy," Holmquist argues. "Two-thirds of our district heating comes from waste energy, that's the whole point of the system."