Statnett Brand Guidelines: Norway’s Grid Operator Since 1992 and Its Black-Green Logo

A grid company carved out in 1992.

Statnett is the company that owns and runs Norway’s transmission grid, the highest-voltage level of the national power network, and acts as system operator for the whole Norwegian power system. It is a statsforetak, a state enterprise, owned by the Norwegian state through the Ministry of Energy, the company says, and has its head office in Oslo. Norwegian Wikipedia places that office in Nydalen and lists administrative offices in places including Alta, Trondheim and Sandnes.

The company was carved out of an older state body. Norwegian Wikipedia says the state’s power business had been gathered in Statskraftverkene, which was separated from the Norwegian Water Resources and Electricity Board (NVE) in 1986. The Energy Act of 1990 opened electricity trading to competition and required competitive activities, such as generation and trading, to be kept apart from monopoly activities such as running the grid. On 8 November 1991 the Storting, Norway’s parliament, voted to divide Statskraftverkene into two state enterprises: Statkraft SF for generation and Statnett SF for the grid. Statnett began operating on 1 January 1992, taking over the state’s part of the transmission grid with its transformers and switching stations, together with the system responsibility.

The market side was organised separately. According to Norwegian Wikipedia, a subsidiary called Statnett Marked, established on 1 January 1993, took over the power-exchange role of Samkjøringen, the association that had coordinated power exchange between generators since the 1930s. Statnett Marked became the core of what in 1996 became Nord Pool, the Nordic power exchange. Statnett later reduced its holding, and it is now one of the Nordic and Baltic system operators that share ownership of the exchange.

The ministry behind the company has changed only in name: until 1 January 2024 the state’s ownership was held by the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy, which was then renamed the Ministry of Energy, Norwegian Wikipedia says.

Lines, stations and cables abroad.

Norwegian Wikipedia describes the transmission grid as normally running at 300 to 420 kV, with some 132 kV sections, and puts it at more than 11,000 kilometres of high-voltage line and around 150 switching and transformer stations, almost all of it owned by Statnett. The roles are kept distinct: Statnett owns and operates the grid and holds the system responsibility, keeping production and consumption in balance, while regulation sits with the Norwegian Energy Regulatory Authority within NVE.

Statnett also runs Norway’s power links abroad. English Wikipedia describes NorNed, a 580-kilometre direct-current submarine cable between Feda in Norway and Eemshaven in the Netherlands, as a joint project of Statnett and the Dutch operator TenneT. NordLink, a 1,400 MW cable between Norway and Germany, opened in May 2021; English Wikipedia says Statnett owns half of it, with TenneT and the German state-owned bank KfW holding the other half. The North Sea Link, a 1,400 MW cable between Norway and the United Kingdom, became operational on 1 October 2021, according to the same encyclopedia.

At home, the work is mostly building. On 2 October 2025 Statnett said a new power line between Aurland and Sogndal had come into operation, giving Norway, in its words, a continuous grid at the highest voltage level from Finnmark in the north to Agder in the south; the old line there had been a bottleneck within the NO5 price area. In its half-year report of 27 August 2026 the company said it had 271 grid projects under way, up from 248 at the end of 2025, including reinforcements between Sogndal and Sauda with a 420 kV crossing over the Sognefjord, and a new 420 kV line between Skaidi and Hammerfest in Finnmark that was halfway built.

Requests for new connections are the latest pressure. On 9 November 2026 the broadcaster NRK reported that Statnett was introducing a temporary stop on further reservations of grid capacity for data centres, applying to new applications and lasting until 1 August 2027 at the latest, so that clear technical requirements could be drawn up first. Market design matters too: the company says the Nordic day-ahead flow-based market coupling project, in which it took part, went live on 29 October 2024.

How grid operators present themselves.

Electricity transmission operators sell nothing a customer can hold, so their identities lean on the network itself. Most present a short corporate name set in a clean sans-serif wordmark, often with a small symbol or a single letter given weight, and keep the type plain enough to sit on a substation gate, a hard hat or a regulatory filing without change. Blue, green and yellow are the familiar colours of the category, read as sky, landscape and current.

Photography does much of the work. Pylons are shown in fields, dunes and mountain valleys, substations are framed against open sky, and cable ships, converter platforms and offshore islands stand in for the reach of a grid that crosses borders. People appear mostly as engineers and line crews in protective clothing, photographed at work rather than posed.

The websites follow a shared pattern. A grid map and an interconnector page show where lines run and which countries they link, and a network development plan sets out future routes and upgrades as the operator dates and describes them. Many publish real-time system data, with dashboards for load, generation, cross-border flows and balancing prices, and open consultation pages where residents and landowners can comment on planned lines.

The last regular section is recruitment. Careers pages address electrical engineers, technicians, data specialists and graduates, and present grid building as long-term public work. For a designer, the category is a study in restraint: a calm wordmark, a limited palette and a library of landscape, map and data imagery carry an identity that has to be trusted more than it has to be noticed.

A logo redrawn for screens.

Statnett’s identity has a documented redesign. The trade site Energiteknikk, citing Europower, reported on 22 January 2025 that Statnett had quietly begun moving to a new logo, in which the red letters became black-green and were joined by a green stroke. The change covered the whole design profile, its templates and the design manual, according to communications director Fredrik Färber.

The reason given was practical. The previous logo, about 20 years old, combined red and grey, which Färber said worked poorly on the company’s digital surfaces in terms of contrast and universal design, so the colours were adjusted. The new logo went first onto the website and social platforms; signs, the head office and workwear would change only when they needed replacing, so the company expected to live with two logos for a period, an approach Färber described as the most sustainable and cost-effective one.

The rest of the public face is that of a working grid company. Statnett’s English website frames its mission as ensuring a reliable power supply by building, operating and maintaining the transmission grid, and calls its strategy “Electrification for a new era.” Its pages group projects and plans, power-market information, statistics and data from the power system, and news; the about section covers corporate governance, research and innovation, ethics and whistleblowing, and how to become a supplier. Norwegian Wikipedia counts 2,372 employees at the end of 2025. Elisabeth Vike Vardheim became chief executive on 1 November 2024, after serving in an acting role from 1 June that year, and Nils Kristian Nakstad has chaired the board since 2022, Norwegian Wikipedia says.

Statnett and Statkraft share a starting date: both began life on 1 January 1992, when the Storting’s decision divided Statskraftverkene into a grid company and a generation company.

For a design guide, Statnett shows how a grid operator can rework a mark for contrast on screens without repainting every sign at once. Compare Statkraft, the generator split from the same state body, and Fingrid, Finland’s grid operator. For this guide we use a black-green, a fjord grey and a line green with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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