By Andrew P. McCoy and Fred Sargent
Published On October 15, 2021

The second wave of electrification is well underway, and a new era of opportunities in service and maintenance is coming with it. Electrification in the United States did not end when the lights were turned on in the last farmhouse down some remote country road. It has never stopped.

Indeed, it is now surging in a second wave that in this century will touch every aspect of the way we live, work and move about.

Motion pictures serve as a great analogy for understanding the progress of this new wave of electrification. Nothing in a movie really moves but, a long string of still pictures passes through a projector fast enough to trick the human eye into perceiving movement on the screen.

As the second wave of electrification sweeps over the 21st century, its movement may seem less apparent than its predecessor in the 20th century. But if we string together all the still pictures it’s creating and find a way to project them, we will see the larger movement that is inexorably underway.

To help us understand more about this wave of electrification, we visited with Jay Apt, professor and co-director of the Electricity Industry Center at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.