answer:Most municipal steam heating uses “waste heat”, that is, steam that has already been used in some process or other (typically electric power generation), but no longer has the pressure or heat required to drive the process any more, yet still has enough residual heat that it won’t be easily condensed back to water to be put back through the boiler. Some cities, notably Rejkavik, Iceland (and possibly some smaller towns in California) use geothermal steam to power turbines for electric power generation, and then have to re-condense that steam to water prior to re-injection underground to complete the cycle. So they wring out the usable heat and re-condense the steam in the same way: municipal use. In some parts of the world, the “waste” steam is used to drive chemical or agricultural processes that need less heat (and no high pressure!) than the power generation process. The down side to this, of course, as you’re seeing now, is that when the power plant goes down for some reason (such as annual maintenance, if nothing else), then there goes the whole municipal system with it. That’s not such a problem in the summer time, when maintenance outages are normally scheduled.