However, Li Man, general manager of the service provider Anting New Township Energy Technology Service, said the system generates a lot of wasted energy.
The occupancy rate at the community stands at about 40 percent, she said. But as long as one household is using the service, the boiler needs to work at full capacity.
"When the majority of the families may not want the heat, the heat is still supplied in the pipes and the cost is the same to offer the heat to one household as it is to the entire building," she said.
The system consumes a huge amount of energy every year. The community needs about 1 million cubic meters of natural gas for heating in winter and cooling in summer.
The fuel is transported from Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region under the country's West-East natural gas transmission project.
There will be a huge demand for natural gas if the 20 million residents in Shanghai are offered a similar service, Li added.
Clean approach needed
Environmental concerns are forcing authorities to think about a clean heating approach in populous cities like Shanghai, Wuhan and Nanjing, especially after heavy smog and haze shrouded a large swath of China earlier this month as air pollution hit record levels.
Environmentalists attributed the heavy concentration of PM2.5 — air particles smaller than 2.5 microns and able to enter the lungs and even the bloodstream — to industrial emissions, car exhausts and coal burning for winter heating.
As some provinces in the north are dismantling small heating boilers and replacing them with green systems to reduce air pollution, the simple duplication of coal-powered heating system may bring disastrous environmental problems to the south, experts said.
Zhou Rong, the project manager on climate and energy studies at Greenpeace, an environmental NGO, said southern provinces will soon be enveloped in smog similar to what the north experienced earlier this month if it develops a heavy reliance on coal as the major source of central heating.
"The murky hazes that hit the northern parts of the country, such as Beijing and Hebei province, is partly caused by the surge of coal used in the central heating system," she said.
Studies show that PM2.5 is most prevalent in the combustion of coal, she added.
Sun Ming, Asia-Pacific representative for Clean Air Task Force, a non-governmental environmental consulting firm based in Boston, Massachusetts, advocated for better technology to reduce emissions if coal has to be used.
"With an increase of 10 to 15 percent on costs to improve technology, pollutants emissions from coal burning can be greatly decreased," he said.
Compared with the harm caused by air pollution, rising costs, to some extent, are a good deal, he said, adding that authorities should set concerns about temporary economic losses aside.
People on way home during Spring Festival travel rush
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