> A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Founda

> A friend of mine who does large-scale systems designs (he designs power and cooling systems for little things like international airports and the Gates Foundations new buildings) once said that our current power lines sacrifice close to 30% of the energy that they're supposed to be transmitting. "Transmission and distribution losses in the USA were estimated at 7.2% in 1995 [13] and 6.5% in 2007[14]. In general, losses are estimated from the discrepancy between energy produced (as reported by power plants) and energy sold to end customers; the difference between what is produced and what is consumed constitute transmission and distribution losses." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_transmission