Southern Company Brand Guidelines: Alabama Dams, Georgia Power & Plant Vogtle’s New Units

Alabama dams, Atlanta streetcars and a 1945 holding company.

Southern Company is an electricity and gas holding company headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and its roots lie in two older utilities. In Alabama, the Encyclopedia of Alabama records that the Alabama Power Company was incorporated in Gadsden on December 4, 1906, by William Patrick Lay, who won congressional approval for a dam on the Coosa River but could not raise the money to build it. In 1912 he sold the company to James Mitchell, a Massachusetts engineer with ties to a London investment house, who set up a holding company in Canada to bring British capital to Alabama and moved the headquarters to Birmingham. The Lock 12 dam, now Lay Dam, was finished in December 1913 and was sending power to Birmingham by July 1914, the encyclopedia says. Southern Company’s own history names Mitchell as its founding figure and dates his Alabama Traction, Light and Power Company to 1906.

In Georgia, the New Georgia Encyclopedia traces Georgia Power to the Georgia Electric Light Company of Atlanta, chartered in 1883, which began service in 1884. Henry M. Atkinson took control in 1891, and in 1902 formed the Georgia Railway and Electric Company, which ran Atlanta’s electricity, streetcars and steam heat. Its president, Preston S. Arkwright, coined the slogan “A Citizen Wherever We Serve.” In 1920, the encyclopedia says, the company built Georgia’s first radio broadcasting station so that it could reach its plants and substations.

The two lines met in a holding company. English Wikipedia says Southeastern Power & Light was formed in 1924 as the holding company for Alabama’s utility, created Mississippi Power that year and Gulf Power in 1925, and took in Georgia Power in 1926. In 1930 it was merged into the Commonwealth & Southern Corporation, a New York holding company. When that group was broken up under the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, four Deep South companies — Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Gulf Power and Mississippi Power — were allowed to stay together. English Wikipedia says the new holding company, Southern Company, was incorporated in Delaware on November 9, 1945, began operating in 1949 and moved to Georgia in 1950; the New Georgia Encyclopedia gives 1947 as the year Commonwealth & Southern became Southern Company.

Three utilities, a gas business and Plant Vogtle.

Today Southern Company owns three regulated electric utilities — Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power — alongside the wholesale generator Southern Power, Southern Nuclear and a gas business, according to the company and English Wikipedia. The gas business came in 2016, when it bought AGL Resources, the parent of Atlanta Gas Light, and renamed it Southern Company Gas, the New Georgia Encyclopedia says; the same year, English Wikipedia adds, it bought PowerSecure, a distributed-energy company in North Carolina. Gulf Power, part of the group since 1925, was sold to NextEra Energy in a deal completed on January 1, 2019. The company says it serves about 9 million customers.

The group has also let businesses go. English Wikipedia says Southern Energy, an unregulated international arm that began operating in January 1982, was spun off as Mirant Corporation on April 2, 2001, and that in 1996 its wireless service for the group’s own companies also began selling to the public in the Southeast as Southern Linc.

Its largest recent project is at Plant Vogtle, near Waynesboro in Burke County, Georgia. The New Georgia Encyclopedia says Georgia Power broke ground in 2009 on two new reactors, units 3 and 4, jointly owned with Oglethorpe Power, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and Dalton Utilities. Unit 3 entered commercial operation in July 2023 and Unit 4 in April 2024. The encyclopedia calls Unit 3 the first newly built nuclear unit in the United States in more than thirty years, and records that construction was marred by long delays, design changes and cost overruns. English Wikipedia adds that Westinghouse, the reactor builder, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March 2017, and that the Georgia Public Service Commission examined the delays and costs in June 2021.

A second large project ended differently. Mississippi Power began building the Kemper County energy facility in 2010 to turn local lignite into gas, with carbon capture. English Wikipedia records that in May 2016 Southern Company and Mississippi Power said they were under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission in connection with the project, and that in June 2017 the companies announced the plant would run on natural gas only; the gasification structure was demolished in 2021.

Design and documentation.

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 Citizen Wherever We Serve.

Customers of Southern Company mostly deal with its operating companies by their own names — Alabama Power, Georgia Power and Mississippi Power — each with a local history that runs back to the early twentieth century or before. Several of the group’s other businesses carry the Southern name: Southern Power, Southern Nuclear, Southern Company Gas and Southern Linc. The older companies also left slogans behind. Besides “A Citizen Wherever We Serve,” Arkwright created a second line to promote the state across the country, “It’s Great to Be a Georgian,” according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, which also records that Georgia Power set up the Georgia Power Foundation in 1986 to manage its charitable giving.

The company describes itself today as an energy provider with more than 125 years of experience, and its website points readers to two company histories: Innovative Solutions, on its research and development, and Big Bets, on the decisions and leaders that shaped it. English Wikipedia lists Christopher C. Womack as chairman, president and chief executive.

For a design guide, Southern Company shows how a holding company built from older regional utilities can keep those local names in front of customers while its own name sits on the group. Compare Duke Energy, another southeastern utility group, and NextEra Energy, which bought Gulf Power from it. For this guide we use a deep navy, a river blue and a red clay with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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