TNB Brand Guidelines: Malaya’s 1949 Electricity Board, a Light-Bulb “T” and Red and Blue

A mining generator, a hydro station and a board in 1949.

TNB’s story starts long before its name. The company’s own history traces electricity in Malaya to 1894, when the mining entrepreneurs Loke Yew and Thamboosamy Pillai installed a generator at Rawang, in Selangor, to run electric pumps at their mines; private street lighting followed in the town that year, and Kuala Lumpur’s railway stations received a supply in 1895. In 1900, the company says, the Raub Australian Gold Mining Company built the Sempam hydroelectric station at Raub, in Pahang, which TNB counts as the first power station in what is now Malaysia.

Until the mid-1920s, TNB says, most generating plants were small and ran on whatever was at hand — low-grade coal, local wood, charcoal and oil, or water power. As demand grew, large-scale planning, overseas capital and foreign technical experts became necessary. The sources used for this guide do not say how Malaya’s electricity supply was run during the Japanese occupation of 1942–1945. They pick up again in April 1946, when the Electricity Department was re-established and began work on three projects: the Connaught Bridge power station near Klang, the Cameron Highlands hydroelectric scheme and a national grid.

Those projects passed to the Central Electricity Board, in Malay the Lembaga Letrik Pusat, which was established and came into operation on 1 September 1949. According to TNB, the board began as the owner of 34 power stations, among them a steam station at Bangsar and a hydroelectric station at Ulu Langat, with 45,495 consumers and 2,466 staff. Training of local engineers began in 1951, when three shift engineers left for Britain, and more followed between 1954 and 1957. In 1964, the company says, Raja Zainal bin Raja Sulaiman became the first Malaysian general manager of the board; soon afterwards the Connaught Bridge station became fully operational, and a line from Bangsar to Connaught Bridge, later extended to Malacca, formed the start of the grid.

From the National Electricity Board to a listed company.

On 22 June 1965 the board was renamed the National Electricity Board of the States of Malaya — Lembaga Letrik Negara, or LLN. It went on to absorb the remaining local suppliers, English Wikipedia says: the areas served by Huttenbach Ltd in 1964, the Penang municipal supply in 1976, and the Perak River Hydro Electric Power company and its Kinta Electrical Distribution subsidiary in 1982, so that by the 1980s it supplied the whole peninsula. Its grid, which TNB says links plants from Paka in Terengganu to Pergau in Kelantan and Pasir Gudang in Johor, was connected to the network of Thailand’s EGAT and to Singapore.

The board became a company through privatisation. On 4 May 1988 the government announced a privatisation policy, and two new laws replaced the old electricity legislation and provided for a successor company. Malay Wikipedia dates the formation of Tenaga Nasional Berhad — “national energy” — to 1 February 1990. On 1 September 1990, the company says, the prime minister proclaimed TNB the heir and successor to the board; it began as a private company wholly owned by the government, with Ani Arope as chairman and Ibak bin Abu Hussein, the board’s last general manager, as its first managing director.

TNB is now listed in Kuala Lumpur and sits in the investment portfolio of Khazanah Nasional, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, English Wikipedia says. The encyclopedia describes the company as the main electricity utility of Peninsular Malaysia; through Sabah Electricity it also serves Sabah and Labuan, while Sarawak has its own utility. Its head office is in Bangsar, in Kuala Lumpur, according to Malay Wikipedia, and the group runs a university, Universiti Tenaga Nasional.

The business has since been reorganised. English Wikipedia says the distribution division was split in August 2018 into a distribution network division and a retail division, which runs the company’s Kedai Tenaga customer outlets, and that domestic generation moved into a subsidiary, TNB Power Generation, or TNB Genco, in a restructuring completed in 2020. In 2021 TNB became a part owner of the repowered Blyth offshore wind farm in England, the encyclopedia adds. In February 2023 Singapore Business Review reported that TNB Genco and YTL PowerSeraya had partnered to import 100 megawatts of electricity into Singapore through an upgraded interconnector — the first time, the report said, that electricity from Malaysia had been supplied to Singapore on a commercial basis.

Design and documentation.

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 light bulb drawn as a “T.”

TNB explains its own logo in unusual detail. The symbol, the company says, is a highly stylised light bulb, drawn almost entirely with a single line that resolves inside the bulb into a lightning symbol; the outline of the bulb also suggests a “T,” for tenaga, or energy. The company name is set in a clean, bold typeface, italicised to represent the “dynamic role” TNB expects to play in the nation’s progress, with the bold weight standing, it says, for strength, confidence and reliability. The symbol is a brilliant red, for energy, and the name a cool, solid blue, for strength and dignity; TNB says red and blue together reflect the colours of the national flag.

Its words have changed with the company. English Wikipedia gives the slogan used after privatisation as “Penggerak Kemajuan Negara” — powering the nation — and says that since 2013 the company has used “Better. Brighter.” The Star called that tagline iconic in August 2017, when TNB was the official energy partner of the KL 2017 Games in Kuala Lumpur. The same report described TNB’s long ties with hockey: it had sponsored state and national leagues since 2006 and had launched a coffee-table book, The Sticks, on its 70 years of involvement in the sport.

For a design guide, TNB shows how a utility can explain every part of its mark in plain words: a bulb, a letter, a bolt and two colours taken from the flag. Compare Meralco, the Manila distributor whose franchise dates from 1903, and EGAT, the Thai authority whose network connects to TNB’s grid. For this guide we use a red, a deep blue and a warm grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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