One further even more highly speculative thought... free-form thinking permitted.
Lets say that between your house and the power station there are six transformers, three up and three down, and 16% total line loss; and each transformer is 98% efficient. Note that these losses are all COMPOUNDED just as is compound interest, so that instead of having 16+12 = 28% net losses its more like 33% Lets say that some garage inventor, or left-coast visionary, finds that by using some particular combination of parameters like a new ferrite core material at a resonant high frequency, pulsed DC at a certain duty factor, etc which results in a partial secondary reactance which is effectively regauged from ZPE energy, etc, so that he can produce a high reactance, high resonance transformer which is 102% efficient... What does this mean for the grid? Because of compounding, and the fact that the gain goes both ways, and because HV DC would give you maybe half the line losses of HV AC at the same peak voltage, it could mean quite a lot on the bottom line. Also don't forget that on the supply side, at the dam or steam plant, if you use numerous DC generators in series, you might even get around the some of up-conversion losses... oops, wait a minute.. OTOH who would want to go that route if your transformer was 102%? We don't want to change every appliance in America, so we still want 110 AC at the house. This means that HV DC will need to go to pulsed HV DC then downconverted, rectified and later converted to neighborhood 3 phase. How about this for starters. Even with this modest COP of 2% per stage, and because of compounding and adding more stages, the inventor in one fell swoop has effectively "created" just about the same amount of power as every single nuclear plant in the USA produces. You wouldn't close those, however, just close most of the plants which burn dirty coal or fuel oil. ...big OOPS...on second thought, things get even more interesting... And here is a lesson on how having a particular "mind-set" can get you into trouble... Of course the realist would counter that after further appraisal, even with a modest but presently impossible 102%, you would really need zero power plants at all, that's right none anywhere - and zero national grid to boot... just a single start-up battery and lots of transformers at every house and you have no grid and no line losses and a ready high demand market for several billion slightly OU transformers...!! Time for another chorus of "dream on..." Jones BTW do you know about Doubling Times and the Rule-of-70? The Rule-of-70 provides a simple way to calculate the approximate number of cycles or units which it takes for a variable, which is growing at a constant rate to double. This rule states that the approximate number of cycles n for a variable growing at the constant growth rate of R percent, to double is n= 70/R For example, a state like California with an annual population growth rate of 5% will double its population in approximately 14 years. If the growth rate were 7%, it would double its population in approximately 10 years. I dread to see real estate prices here in 2018... but by then I will have likely moved on to more spacious accommodations, shall we say. Back to the subject of getting off the grid with an OU transformer of a COP of only 1.02. If transformers like this are not just imaginary and can cohere ZPE at a reliable rate, you will need about 35 to double your initial input... but it gets a lot more complicated than that...Lets say you need 10 kilowatts of constant power for your house and can store the excess for peak periods. One way to do this is to produce 20 and recycle 10 of that back through the 35 stages. There probably is also a formula or rule which gives the fewest number of transformers of a particular size or cost, but, hey... first things first... lets worry about how to design that transformer before we start looking for lots of unused closet space....
