Founded by ordinance as a vertically integrated utility for all of Kyushu (1951)

The blueprint at incorporation set the range of motion for seventy years

The founding of 1951 was not the kind in which a manager spots an opportunity and starts a company. An occupation-era ordinance drew the boundaries of nine regions and allotted the existing plant along those lines, and Kyushu Electric Power came into being as the result. Even so, to see this as mere compliance with a rule is to see too little. The design of where generation, transmission and distribution were cut and where they were bundled was also a design for who would make investment decisions. Kyushu Electric started out as a company that took on the demand of seven prefectures in Kyushu as a single object of planning.

That design largely fixed the range of motion of everything that followed. The arch dam at Kamishiiba, the run of coal-fired stations, round-the-clock supply to the remote islands — all were undertakings that could be attempted only because the demand and the tariffs of an entire territory could be set out on one plan. The same design also prepared, at the same time, the concentration on nuclear power and the swing in the accounts whenever the reactors stopped. The outline of the supply area laid down at incorporation remained almost unchanged, as the scope of generation and retail, even after transmission and distribution were cut away on 1 April 2020.