Edison International Brand Guidelines: Southern California Edison, Big Creek & a 1996 Name

Thirteen pioneer utilities, then Big Creek.

Edison International is the holding company of Southern California Edison, the utility that serves much of Southern California, and both are based in Rosemead, east of Los Angeles. English Wikipedia traces the group’s roots to 1886 and Holt & Knupps, a street-lighting business in Visalia, California. The utility in its present form was organised in August 1909 to acquire all the properties of the Edison Electric Company of Los Angeles, which had already absorbed 13 pioneer utility companies in and around the city, according to the International Directory of Company Histories (2004).

Its decisive early deal came in 1917, when it bought Pacific Light & Power, a company controlled by Henry E. Huntington and the Los Angeles Railway, together with a controlling interest in Mount Whitney Power & Electric in Tulare County. In the same year the City of Los Angeles bought Edison’s distribution system inside the city and began buying power from it wholesale. With Pacific came the Big Creek hydroelectric station in the Sierra Nevada, which Edison spent a decade enlarging into a system of three reservoirs, eight concrete dams and 41 miles of tunnels, the directory says.

In 1930 the company became Southern California Edison Company Ltd.; the “Ltd.” was dropped in 1947. It took a share of the power from the federal Boulder Dam, later renamed Hoover Dam, and after 1945 leaned increasingly on steam plants as its territory grew. In the 1960s it bought all the utilities on Santa Catalina Island in 1962 and California Electric Power in 1963; English Wikipedia notes that the company still runs the island’s gas and water services.

SCEcorp, deregulation and a new name.

The holding company came later. In 1988 SCEcorp was formed to own Southern California Edison and a new subsidiary, The Mission Group, which later became Edison Mission Energy. The same year a merger with San Diego Gas & Electric was proposed; shareholders of both approved it, but after two years of review the California Public Utilities Commission rejected it, the International Directory of Company Histories says. Before that, under William R. Gould, who became chairman in 1980, the utility had set out a plan to draw part of its new power from wind, solar and geothermal sources, starting with a wind turbine at San Gorgonio Pass. Howard P. Allen followed as chief executive in 1984, and in 1990 John Bryson, a former head of the state utilities commission, became chairman of both companies.

In 1996 SCEcorp took the name Edison International, as California prepared to open its electricity market; the utility began selling its oil and gas power plants that year. The market opened in 1998, and in the crisis of 2000 and 2001 the cost of wholesale power far exceeded what Southern California Edison could collect from customers under frozen rates. In January 2001 the state began buying power on its behalf, and in October 2001 Edison reached an agreement with the commission to recover its costs through a customer surcharge, the directory says.

Its unregulated arm did not survive in the same form. Edison Mission Energy filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on 17 December 2012, and NRG Energy acquired its assets in 2014, English Wikipedia says. The utility also held a 75 per cent share of the San Onofre nuclear station, which was shut down in 2013. Among the group’s more public moments, Edison International held the naming rights to the Anaheim Angels’ stadium from 1998 and gave them up after the 2003 season.

How utilities present themselves.

Investor-owned electric utilities in the United States sell something nobody sees. Their customers meet them through a bill, a meter, a truck in the street and, when the lights go out, a crew working overnight. So the pictures these companies choose carry much of the weight that a product shot would carry for a maker of goods.

The most familiar picture is the lineworker. Annual reports and storm-season posts return again and again to crews in bucket trucks against heavy skies, to rows of trucks staged before a hurricane, and to poles and wires being rebuilt. Next to them sit transmission towers at sunset, substations, and long views of solar farms and wind turbines, often shown beside older gas, coal, hydro and nuclear plants.

The second register is the customer relationship. Utilities explain smart meters, outage maps and mobile apps for reporting a fault or paying a bill; they print bill inserts on saving energy and send branded customer-service vans to local events. Community-giving photography, from school grants to volunteer days, is a staple of their websites. Trade gatherings such as the Edison Electric Institute’s meetings and the DistribuTECH conference are where they speak to one another and to suppliers.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — when and where it began, which utilities it owns, how its name changed and what its public record shows — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word. The palettes and type here are our own interpretation, not the companies’ marks.

Wildfires and the record.

Wildfires now dominate the company’s record. English Wikipedia says official investigations found Edison equipment responsible for the Thomas Fire of December 2017 and the Woolsey Fire of November 2018, and that the company paid settlements over both. In January 2025 the Eaton Fire burned through Altadena and nearby communities. On 4 September 2025 the United States Justice Department filed two lawsuits against Southern California Edison over the Eaton Fire and the 2022 Fairview Fire, Straight Arrow News reported; Los Angeles County filed a separate suit.

In a quarterly filing in July 2026 the company said that, absent additional evidence, its equipment was likely associated with the ignition of the Eaton Fire; it faced suits from more than 10,000 plaintiffs and was paying claims through a compensation programme for victims, Insurance Journal reported on 31 July 2026, quoting chief executive Pedro Pizarro. On 4 August 2026 the Los Angeles County Fire Department released its report, finding that the fire was caused by electrical arcing on an out-of-service Edison tower in Eaton Canyon; more than 9,000 homes and businesses were destroyed or damaged, NBC Los Angeles reported. The litigation had not been resolved at the time of those reports.

For a design guide, Edison International shows how a holding company can sit behind one well-known utility name. Compare PG&E, its northern Californian counterpart, and Sempra, parent of San Diego Gas & Electric. For this guide we use a Sierra teal, a valley sand and a dry-grass amber with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Edison International’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.