It's hard not to wonder about the how and why. I mean, is it possible for electricity to be practical prior to the steam engine?
Technically yes, folks were experimenting with electrical energy as early or before the earliest steam engines of the 18th Century. There are claims 16th Century metal smiths in Iraq had figured out how to electro plate metals, using acid batteries as the power source.
The trick is electrical motors require high quality metal, & in the 18th Century or earlier coal is the only practical way to refine and forge those metals in quantity. Peat & wood/charcoal, or animal oils are too inefficient for the sort of metals production that provided the hardware for the industrial revolution. Charcoal furnaces did produce some high quality iron & steel, but the labor cost of providing the fuel was not competitive with coal and was invariablly replaced when coal forged metals became available. If folks are using coal to make good metal in quantity it is a short step to steam power.
On another discussion board I postulated no coal or oil available. Bacterial activity rendered the acessable deposits useless. The Rennasance in Europe & the same era in China saw the foundations of the industrial revolution laid. the trick is to get it rolling without coal. Possible, but it seems a lot slower to get to widespread use without the same efficiency in metal working and energy production coal provided. Wind and Hydro power are the two most likely alternatives, but they will have to become much more efficient. Wood/Charcoal are very labor intensive, and the sort of energy use of the industrial revolution would strip the landscape bare of trees.
What would the first practical application of electricity be? The telegraph? The electric light? Electric motors? Refridgeration? It's hard to guess, but this could have a big effect on everything else that comes after.
Telegraph is very likely. Low power requirements for operations. The main obstacle is affordable wire if you dont have coal. Electroplating metals is another, which would not require a lot of refined metals for transmission lines.
Industrial motors were next in OTL, tho the incentive for those was they obviated the need for building factories adjacent to water - in flood plains. Again if you cant produce wire for transmission lines in quantity you lose much of the benefit.
If electricity arises from water and wind harnessing devices, such as the mills already in place, it would certainly have a decentralizing effect. In fact, I doubt we'd have anything resembling a grid today, except within major cities perhaps where all utilities are necessarily centralized. In fact, given the large number of people who do not live near moving water or reliable winds, solar energy would have probably been developed sooner.
Battery technology, or chemical generation of power,is likely to advance the fastest. For things like communications where the operating power requirement is relatively low a chemical power generation technology could develop. Solar power as we think of it is very far off in this scenario. Nuclear energy would come before our sort of electrical generation of solar power. Of course basic solar heating systems for buildings would be much better developed than in OTL.
Then again, it is possible that the government, seeing that power production can't increase beyond what some water mills and wind mills put out, will begin building dams, coal plants, etc. and we end up with virtually the same situation we have now, except perhaps fuel cell cars are developed instead of IC engine cars.
Assuming fossil fuels are not available it will require a very high development of efficiency in other power sources. Efficiency in Hydro/wind generation of electricity would have to hit 20 Century levels of effciency to power up the scale of the early 19th Century industrial revolution. It could (no guarantee) happen, but it would advance a lot slower.