Exelon Brand Guidelines: The 2000 ComEd–PECO Merger & Six Utilities After Constellation

Two Edison-era companies, one new name.

Exelon is a utility holding company headquartered in Chicago and created in October 2000 by the merger of PECO Energy of Philadelphia and Unicom, the parent of Chicago’s Commonwealth Edison, English Wikipedia says. Unicom was based in Chicago, and the city became the new company’s home, although Exelon is incorporated in Pennsylvania. The name was new in 2000, but both halves of the company reach back to the first decades of electric lighting in America.

Commonwealth Edison, known as ComEd, traces its line to the Isolated Lighting Company, set up in Chicago in early 1881 to sell small Edison-patented generators and lighting systems, and to the Western Edison Light Company of 1882, which installed the first incandescent lighting in a Chicago home, first lit on 10 November that year, English Wikipedia says. The Chicago Edison Company took over Western Edison’s business in July 1887 and opened its first central generating station on West Adams Street in August 1888. In 1892 Samuel Insull, a former associate of Thomas Edison, was elected its president; he opened a much larger station on Harrison Street in 1894 and bought out competitors to build a single service in the company’s territory. In 1907 Chicago Edison combined with Commonwealth Electric to form the Commonwealth Edison Company, and in 1994 ComEd reorganised under the holding company Unicom.

The Philadelphia half is PECO, formerly the Philadelphia Electric Company. English Wikipedia’s PECO article dates the company to 1881, with incorporation in 1929, while its Exelon article gives 1902 for PECO’s formation. Its Chester Waterside Station, built in 1916, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2007, and PECO’s electric service area covers the whole of Philadelphia and most of the surrounding Pennsylvania counties.

Constellation in, Pepco in, Constellation out.

Exelon grew by acquisition. A planned merger with New Jersey’s Public Service Enterprise Group was approved by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission in July 2005 but was terminated about 18 months later, English Wikipedia says. On 12 March 2012 Exelon completed its purchase of Constellation Energy, the Baltimore group that Baltimore Gas and Electric had created as a holding company in 1999; the regulated utility BGE became part of Exelon’s utility business. Exelon announced its purchase of Pepco Holdings, the parent of the Washington, D.C., utility Pepco, in April 2014. The District of Columbia Public Service Commission rejected the merger in August 2015 and approved it on 23 March 2016, when the deal was completed, the encyclopedia says.

Before the merger, ComEd had already separated power plants from wires. Under an Illinois law of 1997 that opened electricity supply to competition, ComEd sold its coal-fired generating stations to Midwest Generation in 2000 and its nuclear stations to Exelon Nuclear, a sister subsidiary, in 2003, English Wikipedia says.

The next big change ran the other way. On 2 February 2022 Exelon completed the spin-off of Constellation Energy, its power-generation business, which became an independent company headquartered in Baltimore, while BGE stayed with Exelon, English Wikipedia says. That left Exelon as a group of regulated transmission and distribution utilities. Exelon says on its website that it serves almost 11 million customers through six fully regulated transmission and distribution utilities, among them ComEd, PECO, BGE and Pepco, with Atlantic City Electric in New Jersey and Delmarva Power completing the set.

The ComEd story also includes a legal chapter. In July 2020 ComEd entered into a three-year deferred prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors over a bribery charge, English Wikipedia says. On 17 July 2023 a federal judge in Chicago dismissed the charge after prosecutors told the court that ComEd had fully complied with the agreement, the Chicago Sun-Times reported.

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 parent brand above six local names.

Exelon’s structure shapes how it appears in public. Its six utilities operate under their own names, such as ComEd in northern Illinois and PECO in southeastern Pennsylvania, while Exelon is the parent above them. On its website the company describes itself as “one of the nation’s largest utility companies” with “more than 20,000 employees,” and its home page carries a section titled “The Exelon Promise,” which says customers are frustrated with rising energy costs and sets out the company’s relief measures. Its shares trade on Nasdaq under the ticker EXC.

The headquarters is in Chicago’s Chase Tower, English Wikipedia says, the city where Insull led Chicago Edison from 1892. PECO serves Philadelphia and BGE serves Maryland, so the group’s map still follows the territories of the older companies that formed it.

The 2022 separation also changed which name carries the power plants. The nuclear and other generating stations that Exelon once ran now sit with Constellation Energy in Baltimore, while Exelon describes its own business as the transmission and distribution of energy through its six utilities.

For a design guide, Exelon shows a holding-company brand that stays in the background while older local names face the customer. Compare Con Edison, another city utility with Edison in its name, and Dominion Energy, which turned a 1983 holding-company name into its customer brand. For this guide we use a lakefront blue, a deep ink and a grid teal with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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