Overcoming resistance losses in wires has been an issue for decades. For awhile, people felt that advances in superconductive materials would allow for massive improvements, but those materials remain very expensive to produce and not very conducive to wire-like solid forms.
I think the current breakthroughs have been much more concentrated in battery technology. As I posted awhile ago, Exxon is actually a leader in this area. The whole subject is quite a bit less of a black hat/white hat argument than many think it is.
