Terna Brand Guidelines: Enel’s 1999 Grid Spin-Off, a 2004 Listing & the SA.PE.I. Cable

A 1999 decree split the grid from the generator.

Terna was set up in Rome on 31 May 1999 as a company inside Enel, the former national electricity monopoly. English Wikipedia says the step implemented Legislative Decree 79/99, which, as part of the opening of the Italian electricity market, separated ownership of the national transmission grid from its management. Italian Wikipedia, which calls the law the Bersani decree, gives the company’s first full name as Terna – Trasmissione Elettrica Rete Nazionale; today it is Terna – Rete Elettrica Nazionale S.p.A.

The company went to the stock market five years later. On 23 June 2004, following a prime-ministerial decree of 11 May that year, Enel sold control of Terna through a public offering on Borsa Italiana, both Wikipedia editions say. Italian Wikipedia records that Enel kept half of the capital until 15 April 2005, when an accelerated bookbuilding cut its stake to about 36%, and that on 15 September 2005 it sold 29.99% to Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, the state-controlled lender, which has been the largest single shareholder since.

In November 2005 Terna took over a business unit of GRTN, the former grid manager, as set out in the 2004 decree. In August 2014, Italian Wikipedia says, State Grid Corporation of China took a 35% stake in CDP Reti, the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti company that holds the Terna shares. English Wikipedia gives CDP Reti’s holding as 29.9%, with the rest held by institutional and retail investors, and Terna is a member of the FTSE MIB index.

The group was reorganised in 2011 as a holding company over two wholly owned operating companies, Terna Rete Italia for the grid and Terna Plus for new business, each with its own chief executive and board, according to both Wikipedia editions.

Nearly the whole high-voltage grid.

Terna grew by buying the lines it did not yet own. On 1 April 2009 it bought Enel Linee Alta Tensione from Enel Distribuzione, with 18,583 kilometres of high-voltage grid, which English Wikipedia says took Terna’s share of the national grid to 98.5%. In December 2015 Terna, Ferrovie dello Stato Italiane and the rail-network company RFI signed a contract for Terna to buy S.EL.F., the railway group’s electricity-transmission company, with 8,379 kilometres of lines — growth of about 13%, the business site Affaritaliani reported on 10 December 2015.

Today English Wikipedia credits Terna with 75,905 kilometres of lines, around 98% of Italy’s high-voltage transmission grid, 926 transformation and switching stations, a national control centre, four further control centres and 30 interconnection lines with other countries. Among them is SA.PE.I., the 435-kilometre submarine link to Sardinia, which Italian Wikipedia describes as the deepest submarine power cable anywhere. As a natural monopoly, Terna is regulated by ARERA, the Italian authority for energy, networks and the environment.

Much of its recent work has been under the sea or across borders. English Wikipedia lists the Capri–Torre Annunziata cable begun in 2013; the Piedmont–Savoy interconnection with France, built with the French operator RTE and in service in 2023; links with Montenegro, inaugurated in 2019, and Austria, operating from 2023; the SA.CO.I.3 link between Italy, Corsica and Sardinia; and the Elba–Piombino connection of 2023. The Tyrrhenian Link between Campania and Sicily was launched in 2022 and the Adriatic Link between the Marche and Abruzzo in 2023. Both Wikipedia editions describe the Italy–Tunisia project as the first submarine direct-current link between Europe and North Africa.

Terna’s 2023–2032 Development Plan, updated in 2025, includes more than 30 infrastructure projects, among them the Hypergrid, which uses high-voltage direct current with the aim of doubling exchange capacity, English Wikipedia says.

Design and documentation.

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.

Driving Energy, under new leadership.

Outside the regulated grid, Terna runs non-regulated businesses through Terna Energy Solutions, which English Wikipedia says works in photovoltaics, energy efficiency, smart grids and fibre optics and makes transformers and underground cables; its companies include the transformer maker Tamini Trasformatori and Brugg Kabel Services. In March 2025 the system-integrator work of several group companies was brought together in a new company, Altenia. Terna Plus holds the group’s businesses in Peru and the United States. The Terna Foundation, set up in July 2024 and presented in 2025, works on energy education, energy poverty and access to jobs in the sector.

The leadership changed in 2026. At the shareholders’ meeting of 12 May 2026, MF Milano Finanza reported, a new board took office with Stefano Cuzzilla as chairman and Pasqualino Monti, previously chief executive of the air-traffic operator Enav and chosen by CDP Reti, as chief executive; he succeeded Giuseppina Di Foggia, who had been elected chair of Eni. Lettera43 reported on 13 May 2026 that the board named Monti chief executive and general manager unanimously. Di Foggia had been appointed in April 2023; English Wikipedia describes her as the first woman to lead a major listed Italian company.

Terna’s website pairs its name with the line “Driving Energy.”

For a design guide, Terna shows how a grid company born from the break-up of a national monopoly presents itself through engineering — cables, interconnections and long-range plans — rather than consumer products. Compare RTE, its partner on the Piedmont–Savoy link, and Endesa, the Spanish utility in the Enel group. For this guide we use a deep grid blue, a slate grey and a pale sky tone with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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