Wasted Energy

This from Bill McKibben's Deep Economy, explaining why the centralized generation of electric power is a misbegotten approach:

Those big [power] plants are usually off by themselves in the hinterlands (if you've seen one, you know why). When they burn coal, an enormous amount of the energy is wasted as heat that simply goes up into the air; one recent British study indicated that 61 percent of the energy value of the coal just disappears. Another 4 percent vanished in the transmission process, because shipping electricity through those long networks is inherenently inefficient. And another 13 percent was wasted because people were using inefficient refrigerators and dryers and other appliances in their homes.

When you add up those percentages, you find out that 78 percent of the power generated is not put to any real use by anyone.

If that's not an argument for decentralizing power generation, I don't know what is.