Electrical power in the context of Overhead power line

The Second Industrial Revolution, also known as the Technological Revolution, was a phase of rapid scientific discovery, standardisation, mass production and industrialisation from the late 19th century into the early 20th century. The First Industrial Revolution, which ended in the middle of the 19th century, was punctuated by a slowdown in important inventions before the Second Industrial Revolution in 1870. Though a number of its events can be traced to earlier innovations in manufacturing, such as the establishment of a machine tool industry, the development of methods for manufacturing interchangeable parts, as well as the invention of the Bessemer process and open hearth furnace to produce steel, later developments heralded the Second Industrial Revolution, which is generally dated between 1870 and 1914 when World War I commenced.

Advancements in manufacturing and production technology enabled the widespread adoption of technological systems such as telegraph and railroad networks, gas and water supply, and sewage systems, which had earlier been limited to a few select cities. The enormous expansion of rail and telegraph lines after 1870 allowed unprecedented movement of people and ideas, which culminated in a new wave of colonialism and globalization. In the same time period, new technological systems were introduced, most significantly electrical power and telephones. The Second Industrial Revolution continued into the 20th century with early factory electrification and the production line; it ended at the beginning of World War I.

Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems that use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the latter half of the 19th century after the commercialization of the electric telegraph, the telephone, and electrical power generation, distribution, and use.

Electrical engineering is divided into a wide range of different fields, including computer engineering, systems engineering, power engineering, telecommunications, radio-frequency engineering, signal processing, instrumentation, control engineering, photovoltaic cells, electronics, and optics and photonics. Many of these disciplines overlap with other engineering branches, spanning a huge number of specializations including hardware engineering, power electronics, electromagnetics and waves, microwave engineering, nanotechnology, electrochemistry, renewable energies, mechatronics/control, and electrical materials science. Electrical engineers also study machine learning and computer science techniques due to significant overlap.

AC power plugs and sockets connect devices to mains electricity to supply them with electrical power. A plug is the connector attached to an electrically operated device, often via a cable. A socket (also known as a receptacle or outlet) is fixed in place, often on the internal walls of buildings, and is connected to an AC electrical circuit. Inserting ("plugging in") the plug into the socket allows the device to draw power from this circuit.

Plugs and wall-mounted sockets for portable appliances became available in the 1880s, to replace connections to light sockets. A proliferation of types were subsequently developed for both convenience and protection from electrical injury. Electrical plugs and sockets differ from one another in voltage and current rating, shape, size, and connector type. Different standard systems of plugs and sockets are used around the world, and many obsolete socket types are still found in older buildings.

A power outage, also called a blackout, a power failure, a power blackout, a power loss, a power cut, or a power out is the complete loss of the electrical power network supply to an end user.

There are many causes of power failures in an electricity network. Examples of these causes include faults at power stations, damage to electric transmission lines, substations or other parts of the distribution system, a short circuit, cascading failure, fuse or circuit breaker operation.

A power inverter, inverter, or invertor is a power electronic device or circuitry that changes direct current (DC) to alternating current (AC). The resulting AC frequency obtained depends on the particular device employed. Inverters do the opposite of rectifiers which were originally large electromechanical devices converting AC to DC.

The input voltage, output voltage and frequency, and overall power handling depend on the design of the specific device or circuitry. The inverter does not produce any power; the power is provided by the DC source.

A fiber-optic sensor is a sensor that uses optical fiber either as the sensing element ("intrinsic sensors"), or as a means of relaying signals from a remote sensor to the electronics that process the signals ("extrinsic sensors"). Fibers have many uses in remote sensing. Depending on the application, fiber may be used because of its small size, or because no electrical power is needed at the remote location, or because many sensors can be multiplexed along the length of a fiber by using light wavelength shift for each sensor, or by sensing the time delay as light passes along the fiber through each sensor. Time delay can be determined using a device such as an optical time-domain reflectometer and wavelength shift can be calculated using an instrument implementing optical frequency domain reflectometry.

Fiber-optic sensors are also immune to electromagnetic interference, and do not conduct electricity so they can be used in places where there is high voltage electricity or flammable material such as jet fuel. Fiber-optic sensors can be designed to withstand high temperatures as well.

Peak demand on an electrical grid is the highest electrical power demand that has occurred over a specified time period (Gönen 2008). Peak demand is typically characterized as annual, daily or seasonal and has the unit of power.Peak demand, peak load or on-peak are terms used in energy demand management describing a period in which electrical power is expected to be provided for a sustained period at a significantly higher than average supply level. Peak demand fluctuations may occur on daily, monthly, seasonal and yearly cycles. For an electric utility company, the actual point of peak demand is a single half-hour or hourly period which represents the highest point of customer consumption of electricity. At this time there is a combination of office, domestic demand and at some times of the year, the fall of darkness.

Some utilities will charge customers based on their individual peak demand. The highest demand during each month or even a single 15 to 30 minute period of highest use in the previous year may be used to calculate charges. The renewable energy transition will include considerations for peak demand.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Plant (柏崎刈羽原子力発電所, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa genshiryoku-hatsudensho; Kashiwazaki-Kariwa NPP) is a large, modern (housing the world's first advanced boiling water reactor or ABWR) nuclear power plant on a 4.2-square-kilometer (1,000-acre) site. The campus spans the towns of Kashiwazaki and Kariwa in Niigata Prefecture, Japan, on the coast of the Sea of Japan, where it gets cooling water. The plant is owned and operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), and it is the largest nuclear generating station in the world by net electrical power rating.

On 16 July 2007, the Chūetsu offshore earthquake took place, with its epicenter located only 19 km (12 mi) from the plant. The earthquake registered M_w 6.6, ranking it among the strongest earthquakes to occur in the immediate range of a nuclear power plant. This shook the plant beyond design basis and initiated an extended shutdown for inspection, which indicated that greater earthquake-proofing was needed before the operation could be resumed. The plant was completely shut down for 21 months following the earthquake. Unit 7 was restarted after seismic upgrades on 19 May 2009, followed later by units 1, 5, and 6. (Units 2, 3, and 4 were not restarted by the time of the March 2011 earthquake.)

A charging station, also known as a charge point, chargepoint, or electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE), is a power supply device that supplies electrical power for recharging the on-board battery packs of plug-in electric vehicles (including battery electric vehicles, electric trucks, electric buses, neighborhood electric vehicles, and plug-in hybrid vehicles).

There are two main types of EV chargers: alternating current (AC) charging stations and direct current (DC) charging stations. Electric vehicle batteries can only be charged by direct current electricity, while most mains electricity is delivered from the power grid as alternating current. For this reason, most electric vehicles have a built-in AC-to-DC converter commonly known as the "on-board charger" (OBC). At an AC charging station, AC power from the grid is supplied to this onboard charger, which converts it into DC power to recharge the battery. DC chargers provide higher-power charging (which requires much larger AC-to-DC converters) by building the converter into the charging station to avoid size, weight and cost restrictions inside vehicles. The station then directly supplies DC power to the vehicle, bypassing the onboard converter. Most modern electric vehicles can accept both AC and DC power.