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Finding alternatives to electric energy production is not easy because the largest part of the primary energy sources like oil and hydrocarbons, hydroelectric, solar, wind, geothermic, nuclear energies tends to be converted in electric energy for their direct use in houses and in industry.
On the other hand, avoiding the conversion in electric energy as much as possible is useful because the yield of this conversion is always much inferior than 100%, with a dissipation as heat and radiating energy.

Here is a short description of the main system of energy generation without producing electric power:

1) The simplest alternative is to directly exploit the heat of the Sun to produce hot water for a domestic use; the simplest system is placing water in heat absorbing containers that are big tanks placed outside houses to absorb the most possible of sunlight. This is useful for single users in houses in the countryside or in the mountains and, also, on ships, boats and caravans.

2) A lot of useful heat can be directly exploited from ovens, boilers, combustion chambers or exothermic chemical reactors of industries to obtain great amounts of heat that, otherwise, would be wasted.
This is possible with the "co-generation" system, where either heat and electric power are exploited and with the "heat-only boiler station", where the water heated for industrial purposes don't produce electric power but only heat that is exploited.
Both systems still burn fossil fuels, but they can alternatively use solar or geothermal energy.
Various plants are already working in various Countries of Europe and America and provide heat for urban heating.

This heat is absorbed by water flowing in coil pipes surrounding these reactors or burners and sent to other industrial uses or to the houses of that zone, through insulated pipelines to minimize heat losses.

The yield of a traditional steam-electric power plant that generates only electric power is only 47% of the fuel provided and the remaining energy is lost in the environment. A co-generation plant or a heat-only boiler, instead, recover most of this lost heat so that its yield can touch 90%.

This system is called "district heating" or also "tele-heating" and generally, it is based on the transmission of heat by means of a circulating fluid (water, air or, sometimes, silicone oil).
Some towns in Europe are already using much tele-heating, with remarkable reductions in oil and natural gases consumption.
Unluckily, this use is still

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