Can you elaborate where you get the 6% number from? At least for me the energy transport cost is separated out (as the energy production and energy distribution are separate companies/services) and comes out to something like 40% of pre-tax electricity cost.
6% is in the ballpark of electricity loss during transmission (and even that is on the low end - depending on how the last mile delivery is done, the lower voltage cables and transformers near the consumer can easily push it up to 10%+), but that isn't the main part of the cost, that is dominated by the cost of building and maintaining the delivery infrastructure.
I think our numbers are not incompatible. Consider the French market which I understand better than the US one and has a monopoly.
28% is the transport cost of electricity overall - the figure 40% you have probably comes from average RETAIL price of electricity in some low density zones. Let's check the average cost, gross and retail, just because I'm an engineer and care about the viability of a solution from a pure technical standpoint :).
In 2019, RTE spent 426M euros/year in long distance transportation of electricity on a 20B electricity market - we have to remember that transport also includes the real estate (80M), admin (161M), local grid (789M) according to https://www.rte-france.com/en/finance/key-figures-financial-...
Those figures are stable year over year. Year over year may seem insufficient as it doesnt consider the initial investment, but remember we already have most of the grid in place already, so that's what matters to me.
The "trick" is to make use believe that local removes transport cost, but the truth is that we still need a local grid and space to put it, which is the bulk of the cost.
Overall I consider the grid to be a low cost solution we put in place years ago when we were poorer and things cost a ton because of the manual labor - but now we already got it so why not considering it only for its cost to maintain and expand and not overall cost to "deploy" as the article did.
6% is in the ballpark of electricity loss during transmission (and even that is on the low end - depending on how the last mile delivery is done, the lower voltage cables and transformers near the consumer can easily push it up to 10%+), but that isn't the main part of the cost, that is dominated by the cost of building and maintaining the delivery infrastructure.