Electrical Safety Starts With Reliability | Jon Bucciarelli, SDMyers

If you have one transformer, it IS your critical transformer — and the market won’t send you a new one for years.

At the 2026 IEEE PES T&D Show in Chicago, APC Media’s Alan Ross sat down with Jon Bucciarelli, President of SDMyers, for a wide-ranging conversation about the industrial transformer shortage, proactive asset stewardship, and the life-or-death connection between transformer reliability and electrical safety on the plant floor.

SDMyers serves approximately 7,500 customers across the country — most with just one to five transformers. That’s not a small account. That IS the grid for those facilities. Jon shares why serving the industrial “underserved market” is at the heart of SDMyers’ mission — and why proactive maintenance today is the only real defense against a supply chain that won’t recover overnight.

Key Takeaways:

• Utilities and data centers consumed transformer inventory at breakneck speed — leaving industrial customers waiting 18 months to 4 years for replacements
• For most industrial customers with 1–5 transformers, every unit is critical — yet many have no electrical engineer on staff
• NFPA 70B and emerging fault detection technologies now make early detection possible — acting like a “body scan” for transformer health
• The link between transformer reliability and electrical safety: a reliable plant IS a safe plant — transformer fires don’t just cost money, they cost lives
• Jon joined the board of ESRA (Electrical Safety and Reliability Association) — co-founded by Alan Ross — bringing SDMyers’ decades of field experience into standards leadership
• SDMyers’ founding philosophy, established in the 1960s: keep the transformer in reliable shape and it will last for decades — and it will be safe