I have been considering these systems for a very long time. No energy system will be without risk; the best we can do is to use combinatorial optimization techniques to minimize risk and environmental impact.
For the last five or ten years, I've spent a lot of time looking at papers about heat networks, and mused about them on my own.
Not to find myself endorsing the silly ideologies of Amory Lovins, chief "scientist" at the Rocky Mountain Institute located in bourgeois heaven, Aspen, Colorado, represented in Congress by that great intellectual, Loren Bobbitt, there is a lot to be said for high energy efficiency.
Lovins, being a fool with his head up his consumerist ass, thinks that the outcome of efficiency would be to reduce the use of energy. He has apparently never heard of Jevons Paradox, or if he has, is in simple denial about its reality. To me, the use of highly efficient energy systems relying on heat networks is not to reduce the use of energy, but to increase it, with the goal of extending it to those who have no or very limited access to it.
It is experimentally observed, generally, that nations with the lowest birth rates, some even under replacement value, are precisely those where people feel secure in their homes, have sufficient food, high levels of education, and political stability.
Poverty is very much an environmental issue.
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