[rlmorel]

No apology was necessary, since I had the drift of what you were saying. I see your examples, but I have to admit I wouldn't have thought of them. I guess "hidden costs" is the best way to describe them. The great Thomas Sowell often observes that people often have a weakness for their inability to think past "Stage One", in that a lot of things sound great until someone says "Okay, I will let you do that thing you want to do. What happens next?" That exercise, which one of the professors he admired cajoled him into participating in (after he espoused liberal economic activities during a class) was a key event in changing him from a typical mush-filled-brain-liberal student into the brilliant conservative he is today. I was trying to find the actual text where he related it, but found this expression of what "stage one thinking" is:

EXAMPLE OF NOT THINKING PAST STAGE ONE

In this case, I think your examples are third stage thinking, and I didn't go there! As for the losses in electrical transmission, I had mistakenly heard had heard that up to 40% of electricity transmitted over high tension lines is lost. It is lower, but in checking at least this one source, I found this, which states 30% converted into heat:

****************************************************************
High-Voltage Transmission Lines

So we now finally come to the topic of this page: the transport of large amounts of electrical power over long distances. This is done with high-voltage transmission lines, and the question is: why high voltage? It certainly has a negative safety aspect, since a low voltage line wouldn't be harmful (you can put your hands on a 12 V car battery, for example, you won't even feel it; but make sure you don't put metal across the terminals, you'll get a huge current and a nasty spark!). Electric energy is transported across the countryside with high-voltage lines because the line losses are much smaller than with low-voltage lines.

All wires currently used have some resistance (the development of high-temperature superconductors will probably change this some day). Let's call the total resistance of the transmission line leading from a power station to your local substation R. Let's also say the local community demands a power P=IV from that substation. This means the current drawn by the substation is I=P/V and the higher the transmission line voltage, the smaller the current. The line loss is given by Ploss=I²R, or, substituting for I,

Ploss = P²R/V²

Since P is fixed by community demand, and R is as small as you can make it (using big fat copper cable, for example), line loss decreases strongly with increasing voltage. The reason is simply that you want the smallest amount of current that you can use to deliver the power P. Another important note: the loss fraction

Ploss/P = PR/V²

increases with increasing load P: power transmission is less efficient at times of higher demand. Again, this is because power is proportional to current but line loss is proportional to current squared. Line loss can be quite large over long distances, up to 30% or so. By the way, line loss power goes into heating the transmission line cable which, per meter length, isn't very much heat.

****************************************************************

[wally_bert]

Great cartoon!

[Gondring]

Note that it says "Up stp 30% . . ." Not all systems have that much loss.

See the last sentence of notes from the source data for your figure at http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/pdf/secnote2.pdf
(Section 2 of http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/annual/):

Currently, of electricity generated, approximately 5 percent is lost in plant use and 7 percent is lost in transmission and distribution.

As for thinking beyond "Stage One", I think that we conservatives often note this when liberals ignore it (e.g., losing revenue when raising taxes too much). Therefore, it's frustrating to me to see when conservatives don't consider it.

One thing that conservatives must come to grip with is that while the Free Market is GREAT at many things, it's not a panacea, and phenomena like The Tragedy of the Commons (see William Forster Lloyd) are very real. Unless we address such things, we're very easy to dismiss as living in a snobbish fantasyland that ignores reality.