Nels, focus on the lost BTU's at generation.  What is the North Slope gas worth if half the gas (as BTUs of heat) goes up the chimney as waste heat?  Hint- its worth half... and when you are talking about a trillion dollar resource, you just wasted $500 BILLION dollars.   (That is TEN times the value of the corpus of the Permanent Fund). You'd have to agree that not only is not smart, but unconstitutional.  Article VIII of our Constitution requires Alaska derive maximum benefit.

The line loss issue is trivial by comparison.