EDP Brand Guidelines: Portugal’s 1976 State Utility, a Sagmeister Logo & a Pentagram Spiral

Fourteen companies, one decree.

EDP was created by the Portuguese state on 30 June 1976, when Decree-Law 502/76 merged 14 electricity companies into a single public enterprise, Electricidade de Portugal. The newspaper Público set out the background in February 2012: the companies had been nationalised in 1975, after the 1974 revolution, under a decree of 16 April that took over the mixed-capital Companhia Portuguesa de Electricidade and twelve private concessionaires, among them the Aliança Eléctrica do Sul and the Companhia Hidroeléctrica do Norte de Portugal, as well as Lisbon’s Companhias Reunidas de Gás e Electricidade, which Público describes as largely Belgian-owned and responsible for the city’s first public lighting at the end of the 19th century. The aim, in the words of the decree quoted by the paper, was to run public electricity production, transmission and distribution on the mainland.

The roots are older. Público traces them to a country that relied on imported British coal early in the 20th century and turned to its rivers, the “white coal” of hydropower. A 1944 national electrification law led to two mixed public-private hydro companies on the Cávado and Zêzere rivers in 1945, a national transmission company in 1947, and a 1969 merger into the Empresa Portuguesa de Electricidade. Lisbon’s coal-fired Central Tejo, built in 1909 by the Companhias Reunidas, lost its place as the city’s main power station when the Castelo de Bode dam began working in 1951, the paper reports. Dozens of small municipal and private suppliers were folded into EDP up to the late 1980s.

English Wikipedia records that EDP became a public limited company with wholly public capital in 1991 and was reorganised in 1994 into a holding with separate companies for generation, transmission and regional distribution.

From a national utility to a renewables group.

The state sold down its holding in stages. In December 2011 China Three Gorges won the tender for the government’s remaining 21.35 per cent, English Wikipedia says, citing the Associated Press; Público wrote in February 2012 that the shareholders’ meeting that month opened the door to the state leaving the company. China Three Gorges proposed a takeover of EDP in 2018, and the bid ended when shareholders voted on 24 April 2019, English Wikipedia records. EDP’s own shareholder table, updated in 2026, lists China Three Gorges with 22.20 per cent, followed by BlackRock and Oppidum Capital.

Renewables became the centre of the group. In March 2007 EDP bought Horizon Wind Energy of Texas, and the same year it set up EDP Renováveis to hold its renewable assets, according to English Wikipedia; the unit, headquartered in Madrid, listed 22.5 per cent of its shares on Euronext Lisbon in June 2008. EDP remains the controlling shareholder: its May 2026 market notice describes the unit as a listed subsidiary with a 28.7 per cent free float. In April 2026 shareholders approved changing the unit’s legal name to EDP Renewables, the name it already used internationally, ECO News reported. In 2019 EDP and Engie agreed to combine their offshore wind activities in a 50/50 venture, now called Ocean Winds.

The group still holds a pending internal deal. On 19 May 2026 EDP announced that its Brazilian subsidiary, EDP Brasil, had agreed to buy all of EDP Renováveis Brasil from EDP Renewables, bringing its Brazilian generation and supply under one company; closing was targeted for the end of 2026, and the deal was not completed at the time of writing.

EDP describes itself today as organised across Europe, North America, South America and Asia, with a focus on renewables, networks and energy services. Its foundation, the Fundação EDP, is based at the former Central Tejo on the Lisbon riverfront, which has housed the Electricity Museum since 1990 and is now part of MAAT, the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, English Wikipedia says.

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.

From four shapes to a spiral.

EDP’s identity has been rebuilt twice in fifteen years. In 2011 the group adopted an identity designed by Stefan Sagmeister, Creative Boom notes. The New York studio &Walsh, which lists the project as its own, says it built the identity from four simple shapes, a circle, a half circle, a square and a triangle, layered into hundreds of logos and illustrations, and made work ranging from a television commercial to motion- and sound-sensitive posters and games. EDP itself later called red “so characteristic of EDP.”

In June 2022 EDP replaced it with an identity by Pentagram, led by the partner Marina Willer. EDP’s own account, published in September 2022, says the red “did not fit with our new purpose” and that the new logo adopts a palette of green, blue and purple, standing for nature, renewable energy, technology and people. The symbol is a spiral: Creative Boom reported on 7 June 2022 that the team made it by placing a dot on a circulating surface, so that the motion drew the line itself. The magazine adds that the work replaced the 2011 Sagmeister identity, gave a common design to the group’s 16 logos, set a custom lower-case wordmark, and used FT Base as the supporting typeface, with motion and film at the core of the system. The relaunch followed the 2021 tagline “Changing tomorrow now”, and EDP sums up its purpose as “our energy and heart drive a better tomorrow.”

The name was simplified too. On 10 April 2024 shareholders approved changing the company name from EDP – Energias de Portugal, S.A. to EDP, S.A.; ECO reported in March 2024 that the stated aim was to “simplify the image” and fit the name to an increasingly global company.

For a design guide, EDP shows how a former state monopoly can move from a playful system of shapes to a single symbol drawn by motion. Compare Engie, its partner in Ocean Winds, and Ørsted, another utility that rebuilt itself around wind. For this guide we use a deep green, an Atlantic blue and a dusk violet with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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