Good thing electricity is cheap to transmit.
"Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon filled with tapes" also applies here. The amount of energy you can deliver by transporting fuel rods by truck/train/ship is immense.
Capital costs is why Hawaii has traditionally imported oil versus having an undersea power connection to the continental US.
When costs are all capex, the more you use, the less it costs. (And, as with nukes, the less you use, the more it costs.)
Power losses are measured in single digit percents per 1000km. That's not nothing of course, but it's sufficiently low to transmit power from windy places to less windy places and from sunny places to less sunny places.
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> Currently, the most complete bottom-up inventory of natural gas system emissions is the 2012 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Greenhouse Gas Inventory (GHGI). (2) It estimates an overall system-wide methane loss rate of 6.2 Tg/yr of methane, or 1.3% of methane transported (Supporting Information (SI), Section 16) and that the transmission and storage sector (T&S) is the largest emitting segment of the natural gas industry, (2) accounting for about one-third of methane emissions.
> For T&S stations that are required to report to the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program (GHGRP), this study estimates total emissions to be 260% [215% to 330%] of the reportable emissions for these stations, primarily due to the inclusion of emission sources that are not reported under the GHGRP rules, updated emission factors, and super-emitter emissions.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.5b01669
Gas will literally bleed right through the seals at a certain rate, especially with the compressor motors, which is no different to the electrical losses from stepping voltage up/down.
And this is actually a huge problem with natural gas specifically because methane is an incredibly potent greenhouse gas... around 30x as potent as CO2 over 100 years. Losing a couple percent of your methane is a big deal. That is actually what is driving the push for electric-driven heat pumps for home use... it's better to lose a little bit of electricity than to have thousands of miles of poorly-maintained residential gas distribution that even in the best case are leaking highly potent methane through seals.
But they do. Normally. A fraction of the fuel transmitted through the pipe will be lost, seals, punctures, breaks, medium changes, over-pressure release through venting and so on.
> Power lines do leak. It's called "line loss" and it's a significant factor in power distribution.
Not all that significant in short range transmission, and until we figured out HVDC a major factor in long range transmission but the number of HVDC links that are coming online is increasing rapidly making this much less of a problem. The gear used for this is very impressive stuff, it is a different level of semiconductor engineering than what you normally have kicking around the yard but it works and is deployed at scale already with very good results.
That said, there is only one submarine power cable connecting Norway and Germany, and it's been operational for one year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NordLink https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HVDC_Europe.svg