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By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation. In both cases (electricity and gasoline) loss is marginal and can be mitigated by striking a balance between centralization and transport/power line distance.

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> By that argument, you lose energy when gasoline evaporates during transportation.

Please show me where gasoline is being shipped in open vessels for that argument to hold water. Oil tankers? Sealed. Tanker trucks? Sealed. Your car's gas tank? Sealed.

http://www.caranddriver.com/features/high-tech-fuel-tanks

I wouldn't call it marginal (it's about 7% for the eletrical grid). See https://www.nema.org/Products/Documents/TDEnergyEff.pdf

Merely refining oil into gasoline already has an efficiency of less than 90%.

Marginal doesn't necessarily mean small, but that it's proportional to the overall cost. In economics your fixed costs (eg the cost of building and equipping a factory or an oil field or whatever) go down as a percentage of unit price as you produce more goods, whereas your marginal costs are a function of production (eg transmission losses, taxes, raw materials, labor-per-piece).

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