Taipower Brand Guidelines: A 1919 Utility Renamed in 1946, Sun Moon Lake & a 2026 Wordmark

From a Taipei lighting company to a 1919 utility.

Taipower, in full Taiwan Power Company, is the state-owned utility that supplies electricity to Taiwan and its offshore islands. Chinese Wikipedia describes it as a state enterprise managed by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, serving the main island, the Penghu islands, Kinmen and Matsu. Its head office is the Taipower Building in Taipei, a 27-storey tower completed in 1983; English Wikipedia says it was then the tallest building in Taiwan and the first there to pass 100 metres.

The company’s roots are older than its name. Chinese Wikipedia dates the island’s electricity industry to 1888, when the provincial governor Liu Mingchuan set up a company in Taipei that had a Danish technician install a small coal-fired steam generator, mainly for lighting. After Japanese rule began, the Guishan hydroelectric plant at Xindian, outside Taipei, was completed in 1904, the first hydro plant on the island, the same article says.

The direct predecessor was the Taiwan Electric Power Company. Chinese Wikipedia says it was set up on 31 July 1919 under Governor-General Akashi Motojirō as a joint public and private company, with the colonial government providing four-tenths of its capital and Japanese companies the rest. In the same year it began work on the Sun Moon Lake hydroelectric scheme. When that was complete, the company built a 154 kV trunk line with substations at Taipei, Wufeng, Chiayi and Kaohsiung, joining what had been separate local systems into one western Taiwan grid fed from Sun Moon Lake.

Around the 1940s the company bought and merged many smaller electricity firms, and by 1944 the island’s system had an installed capacity of 320,000 kW, according to Chinese Wikipedia, which also says the company was counted, with the Bank of Taiwan and the Taiwan Development Company, among the three “national policy companies” of the colonial period. The sources used for this guide do not say more about the company’s operations during the Second World War, or whether forced or conscripted labour was used in its plants and construction projects in those years.

Hydro, then coal, gas and nuclear.

After the Second World War the government of the Republic of China took over the company, and on 1 May 1946 it was reorganised as Taiwan Power Company. Chinese Wikipedia says installed capacity then stood at 275,000 kW, but war damage left only 33,000 kW usable; by 1953 it had been rebuilt to 363,000 kW, almost all of it hydro. Thermal generation first overtook hydro in 1962.

The company’s shares were publicly issued on 9 October 1965, Chinese Wikipedia says. After the oil crises of the 1970s it widened its fuel mix and turned to nuclear power: unit 1 of the first nuclear plant, at Chinshan, entered commercial operation on 10 December 1978. In the late 1980s it promoted time-of-use pricing, interruptible supply and energy saving to balance demand. English Wikipedia says a 1994 measure allowed independent power producers to supply up to a fifth of Taiwan’s electricity; Chinese Wikipedia adds that Taipower buys the power those private plants generate.

The structure of the company has been debated for a decade. English Wikipedia says the Executive Yuan approved amendments to the Electricity Act in July 2015 that would divide Taipower into generation and grid businesses, and on 20 October 2016 passed amendments under which it is to be split into subsidiaries within six to nine years. On 1 October 2012 it joined Taiwan Water Corporation in a combined service for water and power bills.

Nuclear power has changed course more than once. The fourth plant, at Lungmen, was mothballed on 24 April 2014, Chinese Wikipedia says. World Nuclear News reported in September 2026 that the two Maanshan reactors were taken offline in July 2024 and May 2025 as their 40-year licences expired; after a May 2025 amendment allowed 20-year renewals, Taipower applied in March 2026 to restart Maanshan, and the Nuclear Safety Commission has completed its review of the plan. The economics minister has said the plant could resume as soon as 2028.

Large outages are part of the record: a wide supply cut in July 1999, a blackout after the earthquake of 21 September 1999, a loss of gas supply to the Datan plant on 15 August 2017, and rotating cuts after a substation fault in Kaohsiung on 13 May 2021, Chinese Wikipedia says. The company also runs one of Taiwan’s oldest amateur baseball teams, founded in 1948.

Utilities in public.

Electricity utilities in Asia rarely sell a product people can hold, so their public image is built from places and services. The most common picture is the city at night: a skyline of lit towers seen across a harbour, offered as proof that the supply works. Out of town the pictures change to substations, transmission pylons striding over paddy fields and hills, and power stations set on coasts and islands.

Much of the visible design work now sits on screens. Customer-service apps and web pages handle accounts, bills, payments and outage notices, and many utilities also run electric-vehicle charging services and reward schemes inside the same apps. The bill itself is a design object: a page of tariffs, fuel charges and usage graphs that households read every billing period.

Campaigns are the other public face. Energy-saving drives, school programmes and community events give a utility a friendlier voice than its engineering does, and they often carry the brand into kitchens, classrooms and housing estates. Alongside them sit transition plans, with dates for running down coal-fired units, adding gas, wind or solar capacity and reaching longer-term climate targets, usually presented as timelines and charts.

The most complete record of how these companies see themselves is often the annual report. For listed and state-owned utilities alike it gathers the plants, the networks, the customer numbers and the plans in one document, with photography and typography chosen to match. The guides in this group look at the history behind each name, and at how that history shows up in the way the company presents itself today.

A calligraphic wordmark, retired in 2026.

For eight decades Taipower’s name was written in cursive calligraphy associated with Yu Youren, the calligrapher and former Control Yuan president, set beside a round emblem with a lightning flash that Chinese Wikipedia says has been used since 5 April 1947. The origin of that lettering was set out in 2026. In May 2026 Taipower confirmed to China Times that a general manager had invited Yu to write the company name, as its in-house magazine recorded, but said the cursive in use was not his original: in the identity update of 1992–93, staff retraced and rearranged his characters. Chinese Wikipedia, citing the Commercial Times, says the identity manual appeared in February 1993.

On 1 May 2026, the company’s 80th anniversary, Taipower introduced a new wordmark by the designer Aaron Nieh and adjusted the emblem, simplifying the red lightning and lightening the blue circle and the characters, Chinese Wikipedia says. The Taipei Times reported on 10 May 2026 that the logo was broadly unchanged, with its lines revamped and the text in a new font, and that Aaron Nieh Workshop had won the contract in January 2024. Taipower said it was “moving away from the familiar calligraphy style toward a cleaner, more modern visual identity”; Nieh said his lettering paid tribute to the flourish of Yu’s calligraphy. The change drew public debate. Taipower told China Times that old and new would run in parallel: the new wordmark on its website and bills, the cursive kept on its head office, district offices and power plants.

For a design guide, Taipower shows how a public utility can modernise a long-used mark while keeping its emblem, and how the history behind a piece of lettering can matter as much as the letters. Compare KEPCO, South Korea’s state-controlled utility with its own colonial-era roots, and CLP. For this guide we use a lake blue, a spark red and paper with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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