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The electrical industry is changing fast. Fortunately, electrons still appear to be travelling in the same direction. Mostly.
There are always “next big things” floating around our industry. Some disappear faster than the 10 mm socket from your tool bag. Others fundamentally change what gets designed, quoted, installed and serviced.
Heading through 2026, we're seeing more of the second kind.
Canada's electricity system is facing increasing demand from electrification, buildings, transportation, industry and data centres. At the same time, contractors are dealing with labour constraints, increasingly sophisticated electrical systems and customers who expect more intelligence from their buildings.
Here are five trends worth paying attention to — not because they're flashy, but because they're beginning to affect actual projects.
For years, electrification was mostly discussed as an environmental issue.
Now it's increasingly an electrical infrastructure issue.
Heat pumps, EV chargers, electric water heating, industrial equipment and other loads are adding demand to buildings that weren't necessarily designed for it.
Canada's Energy Regulator expects electricity demand to increase as transportation, buildings and industrial processes become increasingly electrified. Canada's electricity industry is consequently talking about substantial expansion and modernization of the grid.
For electrical contractors, that moves an important conversation upstream.
Before adding another shiny new electrical load, somebody has to ask:
Can the existing service actually handle it?
That creates opportunities around service upgrades, transformers, distribution equipment, panels, metering, load management and energy monitoring.
It also makes load calculations and early project planning more important.
Installing the charger might be easy.
Discovering that the building needs a substantially larger electrical service?
That's where Tuesday suddenly becomes Thursday.
Expect more projects where the first question isn't “What equipment do we install?”
It's:
“How much electrical capacity do we actually have?”
Contractors who can answer that question early can become considerably more valuable to customers.
EV charging isn't exactly new.
What is changing is the conversation around it.
Transport Canada's latest dashboard shows EVs represented 3.6% of Saskatchewan's new light-duty vehicle market in Q1 2026, compared with significantly higher adoption in provinces such as British Columbia and Quebec. Canada is also continuing to expand charging infrastructure.
But the interesting electrical opportunity isn't simply installing one Level 2 charger in somebody's garage.
It's managing multiple chargers without turning the electrical service into a small bonfire.
Apartment buildings, workplaces, fleets and commercial properties introduce questions about:
Instead of asking:
“Can we install an EV charger?”
Owners increasingly need to ask:
“How do we install 10, 20 or 50 chargers without rebuilding the entire electrical system?”
That's a much more interesting problem.
It also means electrical contractors and designers who understand EV energy-management systems and load-sharing strategies have an opportunity to provide considerably more value than simply installing hardware.
Yes.
Even electricians have to hear about AI now.
Sorry.
The explosion of AI services is contributing to increased data-centre electricity demand. Canada's Energy Regulator now explicitly models additional data-centre load in its long-term scenarios because of the potential impact on electricity consumption. Its Current Measures scenario assumes an additional 1.5 GW of Canadian data-centre load by 2030, while acknowledging considerable uncertainty around how quickly the sector could grow.
And data centres aren't just racks of servers.
Behind those servers are enormous electrical systems:
transformers, switchgear, UPS systems, generators, power distribution, monitoring, cooling infrastructure and increasingly sophisticated energy-management systems.
There's another interesting development happening too.
Smaller edge and micro data centres are bringing computing infrastructure closer to businesses and users rather than concentrating everything inside gigantic facilities. Schneider Electric Canada has highlighted this development as AI applications increase demand for smaller distributed computing infrastructure.
That means the opportunity isn't necessarily limited to contractors working on billion-dollar hyperscale facilities.
Commercial buildings, industrial operations and institutional facilities may increasingly require pieces of the same infrastructure.
The cloud, as it turns out, still needs an electrician.
For decades, the electrical system in many buildings followed a sophisticated operating philosophy:
ON.
and
OFF.
We've improved slightly.
Modern buildings increasingly combine lighting controls, occupancy sensors, daylight harvesting, connected devices, submeters, building automation and energy monitoring.
At the same time, electrification is adding larger controllable loads such as EV chargers and heat pumps. Canada's building-electrification movement continues to focus heavily on electrifying space and water heating, two major sources of building energy demand.
Put those developments together and something important happens.
The electrical system starts becoming an energy-management system.
Instead of simply supplying power, buildings can increasingly decide:
For contractors, that means controls knowledge becomes increasingly valuable.
The contractor who understands both power and controls can solve problems the contractor installing only devices may never see.
And from the distribution side, it means we're increasingly selling systems, not individual SKUs.
A lighting project isn't necessarily just fixtures anymore.
It might be fixtures + sensors + controls + commissioning + integration.
That's a very different conversation.
Here's the uncomfortable math.
We're adding electrical infrastructure.
We're electrifying more equipment.
We're modernizing the grid.
We're building data centres.
And we need people to actually install all of it.
Canada recently established an Energy & Electricity Workforce Alliance specifically to address workforce needs associated with expanding generation, grid modernization and electrification. Meanwhile, Electricity Human Resources Canada reported that electricity-sector employment grew roughly 19% between February 2025 and February 2026, adding approximately 21,000 jobs.
That pressure is encouraging construction companies to look harder at productivity.
We're likely to see more:
Prefabrication.
Assemblies built in controlled environments instead of entirely onsite.
Digital estimating and takeoffs.
Less time counting symbols and more time reviewing exceptions.
Material staging.
Material organized by floor, room, phase or installation sequence instead of delivering one magnificent mountain of cardboard.
Automation and AI.
Not necessarily replacing tradespeople — but reducing repetitive administrative work around estimating, planning, scheduling and documentation.
The broader engineering and construction industry is already increasing investment in digital tools, automation, robotics, AI-assisted workflows and prefabrication as firms try to improve productivity while dealing with labour constraints.
And that might be one of the biggest opportunities for electrical distributors too.
The future distributor can't just be:
Here's your material. Good luck.
There's value in helping contractors with takeoffs, project staging, substitutions, documentation, procurement planning and logistics.
If an electrician costs significantly more per hour than the person organizing material at the supplier...
maybe we shouldn't have the electrician spending half an hour searching through six boxes looking for a fitting.
Revolutionary stuff, I know.
These five trends are connected.
Electrification creates more load.
More load requires smarter distribution.
EV charging introduces controllable demand.
Data centres require extremely reliable power.
Smart buildings require controls and communication.
Labour shortages force everyone to find more productive ways of designing, quoting and installing everything.
The result is an electrical industry that's becoming increasingly interconnected.
For contractors, distributors, engineers and manufacturers, technical knowledge is going to matter — but so will understanding how the pieces fit together.
The person who can connect products + power + controls + logistics + technology is going to be extremely useful.
And personally, that's the part of the industry I find exciting.
We're not just figuring out which breaker fits the panel anymore.
We're figuring out how buildings are going to use electricity for the next 20 years.
Although, realistically...
we'll still spend 20 minutes trying to figure out which breaker fits the panel.
The Current
Electrical products, technology, projects and the occasional opinion from someone who has spent too much time staring at electrical catalogues.
