  We study the generation of a non-equilibrium plasma in scalar QED with N
charged scalar fields through spinodal instabilities in the case of a super
cooled second order phase transition and parametric amplification when the
order parameter oscillates with large amplitude around the minimum of the
potential.The focus is to study the non-equilibrium electromagnetic properties
of the plasma, such as photon production, electric and magnetic screening and
conductivity. A novel kinetic equation is introduced to compute photon
production far away from equilibrium in the large N limit and lowest order in
the electromagnetic coupling.During the early stages of the dynamics the photon
density grows exponentially and asymptotically the amplitude and frequency
distribution becomes \sim alpha m^2/[lambda^2 \omega^3] with lambda the scalar
self-coupling and m the scalar mass.In the case of a phase transition,electric
and magnetic fields are correlated on distances xi(t) \sim sqrt{t} during the
early stages and the power spectrum is peaked at low momentum. Magnetic and
Debye screening masses are defined out of equilibrium. The magnetic mass
vanishes out of equilibrium in this abelian models. The Debye mass turns to be
m^2_{Deb} \sim alpha m^2/lambda for a supercooled phase transition while in the
case of an oscillating order parameter an interpolating time dependent Debye
mass grows as alpha sqrt{m t}/lambda due to a non-linear resonance at low
momentum in the charged particle distribution. The build-up of the transverse
electric conductivity is studied during the formation of the non-equilibrium
plasma. Its long wavelength limit reaches a value sigma_{k\approx 0} \sim alpha
m/lambda at the end of the stage of linear instabilities. Its asymptotic form
in terms of the non-equilibrium particle distribution functions is derived.
