Dominion Energy Brand Guidelines: A 1909 Richmond Railway Firm & a Striped “D” From 2017

Canals, trolleys and VEPCO.

Dominion Energy is an energy company based in Richmond, Virginia, and its family tree is older than its name. English Wikipedia traces its corporate roots to canal and river barging, street lighting, railways and electric trolleys. In 1787 the Virginia General Assembly created the Appomattox Trustees to promote navigation on the Appomattox River, and in 1795 the trustees formed the Upper Appomattox Company to build dams along the river for industrial use, the point the encyclopedia treats as the beginning of Dominion’s history. In 1901 those water rights passed to a newly formed business, the Virginia Passenger & Power Company.

The closest direct ancestor came next. The Virginia Railway & Power Company was founded by Frank Jay Gould on 29 June 1909, English Wikipedia says, and bought Virginia Passenger & Power soon afterwards. In 1925 the company was renamed the Virginia Electric and Power Company, or VEPCO, a regulated monopoly. In 1940 it doubled its service territory by merging with the Virginia Public Service Company, and in 1944 it sold its transit operations, the business that had put “Railway” into its first name.

The brand layer arrived later. In 1980 VEPCO began calling itself Virginia Power, with its North Carolina operations branded North Carolina Power, and in 1983 it reorganised under a holding company named Dominion Resources. A company release of February 2017 describes that holding company as created in 1983 for the group’s electric and natural gas utilities, a services company and a subsidiary then entering natural gas exploration and production. In 1986 the group added territory in Northern Virginia bought from the Potomac Electric Power Company, and in 1987 it sold its West Virginia distribution business while keeping the Mount Storm power station there, English Wikipedia says. A book on the company’s first hundred years, Dominion’s First Century: A Legacy of Service, was published in 2010.

From Virginia Power to one Dominion.

The single Dominion name came with growth beyond Virginia. In 2000 the company bought the Consolidated Natural Gas Company of Pittsburgh, adding natural gas delivery in the Northeast, and that year it rebranded its Virginia Power, North Carolina Power and Consolidated gas operations as Dominion to present one unified energy company, English Wikipedia says. The 2017 release adds that the logo then in use had been introduced just before the merger with Consolidated Natural Gas. In 2001 Dominion bought Louis Dreyfus Natural Gas, and in 2007 it sold most of its oil and gas exploration and production business to concentrate on electricity and gas.

Further deals widened the map. Dominion announced its purchase of Questar, a gas pipeline, storage and distribution company in the western United States, in February 2016 and completed it in September 2016, then completed its acquisition of SCANA, the South Carolina utility group, in January 2019, English Wikipedia says. With Duke Energy it planned the Atlantic Coast Pipeline between West Virginia and North Carolina; the two companies cancelled the project in July 2020, citing cost increases caused by lawsuits.

The current name followed in 2017. On 6 February that year Dominion Resources said it intended to change its name to Dominion Energy, Inc., “in recognition of its focus on the evolving energy marketplace” and to unify its brand after the Questar merger, according to the release as published by the Greater Richmond Partnership. It unveiled a new logo the same day. The release says the mark keeps a “D” shape while modernising it with stripes suggesting energy running through a blue silhouette, and that it was designed by the branding firm Chermayeff & Geismar & Haviv. Sagi Haviv, a partner at the firm, said the studio “simplified the rising ‘D’ and infused it with energy.” Kelly O’Keefe of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Brandcenter guided the rebranding, the release says.

The release also set out the practical work: replacing logos on company facilities and service vehicles, and changing the “doing business as” names in Idaho, North Carolina, Ohio, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. The renamed company’s principal operating units became the Power Delivery Group, the Power Generation Group and the Gas Infrastructure Group. By 11 May 2017 POWER magazine reported that Dominion Resources had changed its name to Dominion Energy, that Questar would be known as Dominion Questar, and that the company also had a new logo. The shares kept the one-letter ticker D on the New York Stock Exchange.

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.

A Richmond name in a pending combination.

The next chapter is pending. On 18 May 2026 NextEra Energy and Dominion Energy announced a definitive agreement to combine in an all-stock transaction, according to their joint release. The combined company would operate under the NextEra Energy name, with dual headquarters in Juno Beach, Florida, and Richmond, while Dominion’s utility companies would continue to operate under the Dominion Energy name in Virginia and the Carolinas; Dominion’s chief executive said in the release that “the Dominion Energy name isn’t changing.” The companies said they expected to close in 12 to 18 months, subject to shareholder and regulatory approvals. In July 2026 they filed for approval with the Virginia State Corporation Commission, the utility commissions of North Carolina and South Carolina, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and on 3 November 2026 they filed rebuttal testimony in Virginia. The combination was agreed in May 2026 and not completed at the time of writing.

For now Dominion Energy remains an independent company headquartered in Richmond and listed in New York. English Wikipedia describes it as supplying electricity in parts of Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina and natural gas in South Carolina, and gives its 2022 electricity production as 18 percent coal, 23 percent nuclear, 48 percent natural gas and 11 percent hydro and other renewables. It is also developing the Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind project, about 24 nautical miles off Virginia Beach, which the encyclopedia says is planned around 176 Siemens Gamesa turbines.

The identity is a study in continuity. The name moved from Virginia Railway & Power to VEPCO, Virginia Power, Dominion Resources and Dominion Energy, and Haviv described the 2017 logo as “an evolution of the company’s visual heritage,” building on the rising “D” the company had used since 2000.

For a design guide, Dominion Energy shows how a holding-company name coined in 1983 became a customer-facing brand, with one redrawn letter carrying a century of predecessor names. Compare Duke Energy, its partner in the cancelled pipeline, and NextEra Energy, which agreed to combine with it in 2026. For this guide we use a deep navy, a clear river blue and a pale sky with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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