You can't easily move energy from one place to another without losing some of it: https://www.ceer.eu/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/3rd-CEER-Repo... That doesn't necessarily result in power outages, though.

To me transformation efficiency and distance losses actually seem to make 5-6% pretty impressive?

> I can’t believe France and Belgium suffer power losses in the 5 to 6% range.

Is the juice worth the squeeze?

For some problems, the closer you get to perfection, the harder the next step is.

It’s where you’ll find most countries with a good handle on their electric network, advanced economies or not. You can do better but it requires either very small service distances (so you don’t have transmission losses in the first place) or an extreme dedication to hunting them down.

I'm not sure what that percentage means, but power-cuts in Belgium are extremely rare.

Czechia is at 5-6 per cent as well, even though our grid companies are quite good. This is the price for having rural areas. Within a single compact city, like Singapore, you can get under 1 per cent easily. One the distances grow to hundreds of kilometers, some non-negligible loss is inevitable.

I don't think that number is correct?

In the 39 years I live here, the only power loss was due to lightning or planned power cuts because of work in the building where I live in the last 9 years ( rare - twice).

There is however incentive for our high chemistry industry to cut the power and they get re-imbursed. This is when we have too much electricity production ( solar power) vs. consumption. Otherwise the providers have to pay "fines" to lose the overproduction of electricity to neigboring countries ( who probably all have overproduction of electricity).

It's embarrassing that it took so long. India has been crippled by decades of socialist government overreach. Unfortunately, even the purportedly right wing BJP is unable to keep the government out of places where it doesn't belong.