The future of power isn’t waiting to arrive. Jacksonville, Fla.-based startup Star Catcher is already using optical power beaming to transmit concentrated solar energy directly to satellites’ existing solar arrays. The company recently broke a DARPA record for transmitted power ahead of its first in-space demonstration later this year. Its contracted backlog has already passed $60 million, from companies betting that orbital computing will scale using beamed power, not bigger solar panels. It all begs the eternal question: who builds the infrastructure for the next kind of power? Will it be you?

Already in orbit

Star Catcher’s orbital energy grid lets a spacecraft generate up to 10 times more power on-­demand without adding hardware of its own. A 100W satellite bus could jump to 1 kilowatt (kW)—enough to run an onboard GPU at full-duty cycle—while a 1,000W to 1,500W bus could reach 15 kW, roughly a quarter of a data center rack running around the clock. Artificial intelligence (A.I.) infrastructure firm Aethero, San Francisco, recently became the company’s tenth power-­purchase customer. 

Back on Earth, the slower-moving bet is space-based solar power transmitted back to Earth. Virginia’s Overview Energy has an agreement to supply up to a gigawatt of space-based power to Meta’s data centers as soon as 2030. The broader industry is targeting initial demonstrations for 2028 and grid-scale contributions in the 2030s.

There may be a lot of steps between a gigawatt being beamed from orbit to an electrician pulling wire, but it’s not as much of a quantum leap as you might expect. Every one of those systems still needs a rectifying antenna field, switchgear and grid interconnection on the ground. That’s an electrical contracting job—and for most contractors, the more immediate version of this same story is already running on the ground, on the same accelerated timeline, in a code book they already carry.

‘Limited energy’ stopped being limited

By most measures, the 2020s are on pace to bring more technological change to the electrical trade than the previous hundred years combined—and unlike orbital power beaming, this part doesn’t require a launch contract. For a century, the National Electrical Code capped voltage and power to define “limited energy.” Then the 2023 NEC introduced something structurally different in new Article 726: Class 4 fault-managed power (FMP), also called digital electricity or packet energy transfer. Instead of throttling down the source’s output, these systems keep a transmitter and receiver in constant, high-speed conversation, checking for faults hundreds of times a second and shutting down within milliseconds if something goes wrong.

The result is a genuinely new category: up to 450V and roughly 2,000W over distances as long as a mile, installed more like structured cabling than a line-voltage circuit. This is the first new power classification the NEC has added in almost 50 years. The 2026 NEC pushed it further by removing the restriction that had kept fault-­managed power out of dwelling units.

The 2026 code’s definition of the broader category makes the shift explicit: rather than a voltage or power ceiling, it defines a limited-energy system by what it does—equipment and cabling that either restrict power outright or continuously monitor it and shut it down before a fault can cause shock or fire. “Limited energy” no longer describes a ceiling; it describes a behavior, and that is what unlocks voltage and power levels that would have required a full line-voltage installation a few code cycles ago.

That shape keeps moving. Chatter ahead of the 2029 NEC points toward proposals that would push fault-managed and hybrid systems well past 450V, with some in the field informally floating a “Class 5” tier reaching toward 1,000V—more than double Class 4’s ceiling, on the same fault-sensing principle rather than a new safety concept. 

The same forces are reshaping how buildings get DC power. The USB-IF’s USB Type-C Cable and Connector Specification now handles 20V to 48V and up to 240W over a pocket-sized connector, and building pilots are chasing the logical extension: a central DC backbone feeding higher-voltage DC to the wall, stepped down at a smart receptacle. One project backed by the Department of Energy tested a receptacle drawing from a 380V DC bus that delivered at least 140W of USB-C power delivery at better than 93% efficiency. 

None of it replaces branch-circuit wiring yet, but it’s essentially the same trend as power over ethernet (PoE) and fault-managed power: power distribution migrating toward smarter, managed-­voltage DC architecture that somebody has to design, permit and install. Pairing power with data adds a benefit of its own: safety, monitoring and efficiency that the system itself can track in real time.

Fault-managed power, PoE and USB-C power delivery aren’t a parallel universe outside the trade’s jurisdiction. They live in Chapter 7 of the NEC. It also helps that end devices keep needing less power. LEDs, PoE access points and sensors are all trending toward lower draw even as they do more, which is why a few managed watts over a data cable can now do the work of a heavier circuit.

That urgency isn’t rhetorical. PoE and fault-managed power are already codified, not a novelty waiting for proof of concept.

A familiar kind of disruption

The electrical contracting industry was born into exactly the kind of disorientation involved in organizing around a technology that hadn’t caught on yet. As late as 1900, electricity accounted for less than 5% of all power used in U.S. industry—yet the course toward rapid change had already been set. The pioneers of our industry were organizing around a technology that was still an open question.

Electrical work in 1901 had no fixed jurisdiction, and that vacuum was filled fast by general laborers moonlighting as electrical wiremen, as one contemporary account in “Empowering an Industry: One Hundred Years of the National Electrical Contractors Association,” put it. Contractors also fought general contractors who bid electrical work with no grasp of its real cost, and architects and engineers over loosely defined wiring procedures. These disputes read just like today’s fights over who owns a PoE lighting system, IoT and the growing number and types of connected devices, from embedded concrete sensors to connected faucets to smart paper towel dispensers, or the cybersecurity framework around them.

As connectivity reaches across more MasterFormat divisions, new trades and new players are entering the limited-energy space by virtue of connected devices, many without familiarity with the electrical codes that govern the work, the performance standards that ensure reliable and low-latency data delivery, or a clear understanding of cybersecurity requirements. The August 2026 ELECTRI International study “Electrical Construction Growth Markets: Defining and Exploring Blue Ocean Opportunities” names the resulting gap a “contractor vacuum.” This refers to the low-voltage integrators who know PoE but not high-power systems, and electrical contractors who know high-power systems but not structured, fault-managed, low-­voltage work, with few firms bridging both. The gap matters because, in many jurisdictions, Class 4 circuits don’t require a licensed electrician to install—meaning IT companies already running structured cabling and PoE switches are closer to competing for this work than the code alone would suggest.

The real playbook underneath the electrical story: define the standard, train to it and get there before someone else captures it. Early electrical contractors didn’t wait for electricity to fully catch on before organizing; they moved while competitors were still deciding whether the technology was worth the trouble. The lesson isn’t that electricity was inevitable; it’s that someone had to build an industry around it before it was, and the contractors who pursued the technology while the work was still unfamiliar kept the market share for the century that followed.

That’s the lens worth applying to both threads here—orbital power beaming is still years away from most job sites, while limited-energy technologies are already recognized in the NEC. If the early pioneers were reacting to a technology that took the better part of a decade to catch on, today’s contractors are living a compressed version of the same arc. The rate of change sped up. The challenge is the same: recognize the shift and capture it before someone else does. 

The ELECTRI study puts a timeframe on that challenge, describing the Class 4 market as still in an early-adopter phase—the kind of moment that hands a real, if temporary, advantage to whichever contractors move first.

Why this is about the trade, not just tech

Class 4 power, DC microgrids, IoT, IT/OT convergence and orbital power beaming can look like unrelated curiosities. They’re not. Each is in a moment where the definition of how power and data get delivered safely and reliably is being renegotiated, and in each one, somebody outside the traditional trade is tempted to claim the work by default.

None of the technologies profiled here have taken off at scale yet, on the ground or in orbit—with the exception of PoE, already two decades old and a common power source for IT devices (though convergence is now pushing it into the OT space). That’s a sign that there’s still a boat to catch. The chapter of the code book covering the ground-level version of it is already sitting on the shelf.

stock.adobe.com/Frédéric Prochasson, stock.adobe.com/ aura studio