Endesa Brand Guidelines: Ponferrada 1944, Privatisation & Enel’s Open Power Cursor

A state company in the Bierzo coalfield.

Endesa’s name began as an initialism: Empresa Nacional de Electricidad, S.A. It was set up on 18 November 1944 in Ponferrada, in León’s El Bierzo district, by the Instituto Nacional de Industria (INI), the state industrial holding. Spanish Wikipedia records that the INI was created by a law of September 1941, during the Francoist period of economic autarky, to promote new industrial companies, and that Endesa, the carmaker SEAT and the steelmaker ENSIDESA were among the large firms established on its initiative. Endesa itself was meant to give the state a company in a sector it treated as strategic, Spanish Wikipedia says. English Wikipedia, citing a 2010 company history, names Esteban Terradas as its first president.

Its first plant was a coal-fired power station at Ponferrada, Compostilla I, sited close to the national coal seams at a time, Spanish Wikipedia notes, when Spain was isolated after the Civil War. Construction began in 1945. Spanish Wikipedia gives an inauguration on 28 July 1949 and the first production unit running in 1957; Endesa’s own history says the plant went into production in 1957. The sources used for this guide do not say who built the early plants or whether prisoner or forced labour was used in the post-war years. An Endesa article for the company’s 80th anniversary describes a country “submerged in autarky and international isolation” and two 50-megawatt units burning anthracite from the Bierzo and Laciana basins. Endesa also bought ten mobile generating units to cover shortages in Seville, Barcelona, Cartagena, Asturias and Mallorca, nicknamed the “electricity firefighters,” according to Spanish Wikipedia.

The company grew around coal. Spanish Wikipedia records that in February 1972 it took over the coal deposits at Puentes de García Rodríguez in Galicia and Andorra in Teruel, with their power stations, and merged with Hidrogalicia; the larger Compostilla II at neighbouring Cubillos del Sil replaced the first plant in 1972. The Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana notes that in its early decades the company produced coal as well as power, from plants at As Pontes, Ponferrada and Andorra.

Privatisation and a takeover battle.

In 1983 Endesa took over the INI’s holdings in Enher, GESA, Unelco and Encasur to form the Endesa group, and in 1985 its high-voltage network was separated into Red Eléctrica de España, Spanish Wikipedia records. Privatisation came in four public offerings. The first, in 1988, cut the state’s holding to 75.6 per cent; a second in 1994 cut it to 66.89 per cent, Endesa’s own history confirms; further offerings followed in 1997 and in 1998, when the state sold its last stake, Spanish Wikipedia says. Sources differ on the details: English Wikipedia dates the change of name to plain Endesa, S.A. to 1997, and the Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana gives 1997 as the year of privatisation. Through the 1990s Endesa bought into Fecsa, Sevillana de Electricidad and Electra de Viesgo, and from 1992 expanded into Latin America through Chile’s Enersis.

From 2005 Endesa was the subject of a long takeover contest. Gas Natural made a hostile bid in September 2005; Germany’s E.ON launched a rival offer in February 2006, which closed on 10 April 2007 with too few acceptances; and in October 2007 Spain’s market regulator, the CNMV, announced the success of a joint offer by the builder Acciona and Italy’s Enel, Spanish Wikipedia records. On 21 February 2009 Enel agreed to buy Acciona’s stake, taking its holding to 92.06 per cent. In 2014 Endesa sold its Latin American business to Enel, and a public offering that November reduced Enel’s stake to 70.14 per cent, according to Endesa.

Since 2014 its business has centred on Spain and Portugal, Spanish Wikipedia says. In June 2017 it created Endesa X, a subsidiary for electric mobility and energy services, and it serves regulated-tariff customers under a separate name, Energía XXI, after the competition authority in 2018 required suppliers to separate their regulated and free-market brands, Spanish Wikipedia says. Coal has been run down: in November 2017 Cinco Días reported that Endesa’s revised plan put no investment into its domestic-coal plants at Compostilla and Andorra and that their closure was under consideration.

How European utilities present themselves.

Many of Europe’s big electricity and gas groups began as something narrower: a regional hydro company, a national gas board, a coal-fired generator, a city lighting firm. Many of today’s names were assembled through mergers, nationalisations and privatisations, and their identities often had to stand for several older companies at once. A single short name and a simple symbol became the usual answer.

The pictures these groups choose tell the same story. Offshore wind farms standing in grey northern seas, hydro dams in mountain valleys, solar fields and transmission lines now carry more of the visual weight than power stations and chimneys. Colour often follows: greens and blues, sometimes with a warm accent for the sun, are common in the sector’s newer identities. Iberdrola’s three leaves, introduced in 2002 when it tied its brand to renewable energy, and Engie’s rising sun, adopted with the new name in 2015, are two examples.

Much of the brand now lives on screens rather than letterheads. Customers meet these companies through smart-home energy apps, online accounts and the electric-car charging points that carry their names on streets and motorways. Iberdrola, for example, redrew its logo in 2023 for digital use, with solid colours and a custom typeface shared by the companies it owns in other countries.

The sector also presents itself through long annual sustainability reports, sponsorship and industry gatherings such as Eurelectric’s Power Summit and the WindEurope annual event. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — where it came from, who owns it, and how its name and symbol changed — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A cursor and a trail of light.

Endesa’s current identity is part of its owner’s. In January 2016 the company presented a new logo designed by Wolff Olins, the agency behind the London 2012 Olympic identity, the Spanish design magazine Gràffica reported on 29 January 2016. The redesign was applied across the brands of the Enel group, including Enel and Enel Green Power, under the concept “Open Power”, meant to suggest energy, openness and a flexible, connected world.

The central device is a small rectangle the group calls the “cursor”. Gràffica quotes Enel describing it as the starting point of energy, always in motion, echoing the filament at the heart of a light bulb. Each letter of the logotypes is drawn from a cursor followed by a coloured trail of light, so the marks read as one family. To signal diversity and openness, the identity introduced eight colours, the magazine reports. It also notes that the new logos drew public criticism when they appeared, while arguing that they gave the group a global identity it had lacked.

The rebrand came after a long period of consolidation. Spanish Wikipedia records that around 2005 Endesa was already bringing the regional companies through which it served different parts of Spain under a single brand; the 2016 identity then tied that single Spanish brand to its Italian parent. A name trap applies: the Chilean company once called Endesa is a separate business, now Enel Generación Chile, English Wikipedia notes.

Endesa’s past survives in its own buildings. The company’s anniversary article describes how the walls of the old Compostilla I plant in Ponferrada now hold La Térmica Cultural, a venue for cultural events created by the Fundación Ciudad de la Energía (CIUDEN).

For a design guide, Endesa shows how a national champion’s identity can be folded into a parent group’s system while keeping its own name. Compare Iberdrola and Naturgy, the other large Spanish utilities. For this guide we use an indigo, a teal and an ember orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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