Southern California Edison Company - Early Vignette

Beautifully engraved and hard to find Certificate from the Southern California Edison Company issued in 1970. This historic document was printed by the Jeffries Banknote Company and has an ornate border around it with a vignette of two allegorical men flanking the early edison building. This item has the printed signatures of the company's officers and is over 30 years old. We have only seen a few of these certificates.





Southern California Edison, the flagship of the Edison International family of companies, is the nation's second-largest investor-owned electric utility company. With 4.2 million business and residential customers spanning a 50,000 square mile service area in coastal, central, and southern California, SCE is proud of its more than 100 years of providing high-quality, reliable electric service.

SCE's transmission facilities include almost 12,000 circuit miles of lines and 800 substations. Its distribution system, taking power from substations to the customer, includes 88,000 circuit miles of line connecting 1.5 million poles, 642,000 transformers, and 490,000 street lights. SCE played a central role in the restructuring of the electric industry in California, which was a leader in deregulating the way in which electricity is generated and sold nationwide. As part of this effort, the company sold its 12 fossil fuel generating stations in 1997 and overhauled nearly every aspect of its business to prepare for the changing environment.

Central to the growth of the region's economy, SCE continues its decades-old commitment to assist businesses seeking to start, expand, or relocate to its service territory, through a comprehensive economic development program. Its support for energy-efficiency earned SCE the Green Lights Utility Ally of the Year Award, presented by the US Department of Energy and the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1996, for leadership in reducing energy usage among major business customers.

Cited by Fortune magazine in 1998 as the nation's leading corporation in its support of minority vendors, and by Working Woman magazine in 1996 for its health care programs that embrace the needs of women and their families, SCE fields a corps of employee volunteers who annually donate more than 700,000 hours of work to community and non-profit organizations. It is a major economic and social force actively striving to improve the quality of life in the hundreds of communities in which its 12,000 employees, thousands of retirees, and their families, live and work.

History In 1896 a group including Elmer Peck and George Baker organized West Side Lighting to provide electricity in Los Angeles. The next year the company merged with Los Angeles Edison Electric, which owned the rights to the Edison name and patents in the region, and Baker became president. Edison Electric installed the first DC-power underground conduits in the Southwest.

John Barnes Miller took over the top spot in 1901. During his 31-year reign the firm bought many neighboring utilities and built several power plants. In 1909 it took the name Southern California Edison (SCE).

SCE doubled its assets by buying Southern California electric interests from rival Pacific Light & Power in 1917. However, in 1912 the City of Los Angeles had decided to develop its own power distribution system, and by 1922 SCE's authority in the city had ended.

A 1925 earthquake and the 1928 collapse of the St. Francis Dam severely damaged SCE's facilities, but SCE survived to finish consolidating its service territory with the 1964 purchase of California Electric Power.

SCE built 11 fossil-fueled power stations (1948-73) and moved into nuclear power in 1963, when it broke ground on the San Onofre nuke with San Diego Gas & Electric (brought online in 1968). In the late 1970s SCE began to build solar, geothermal, and wind power facilities.

Edison Mission Energy (EME) was founded in 1986 to develop, buy, and operate power plants around the world. The next year investment arm Edison Capital was formed, as well as a holding company for the entire group, SCEcorp. EME began to build its portfolio in 1992 when it snagged a 51% stake in an Australian plant (now 100%-owned) and bought hydroelectric facilities in Spain. In 1995 it bought UK hydroelectric company First Hydro; it also began building plants in Italy and Turkey and joined a consortium to construct a plant in Indonesia.

The 1994 Northridge earthquake that cut power to a million SCE customers was nothing compared to the industry's seismic shifts. In 1996 SCEcorp became the more wordly Edison International. California electricity markets opened to competition in 1998, and the utility began divesting SCE's generation assets: It sold 12 gas-fired plants. Overseas EME picked up 25% of a power plant being built in Thailand and a 50% stake in a cogeneration facility in Puerto Rico.

SCE got regulatory approval to offer telecom services in its utility territory in 1999. That year EME snapped up several plants in the Midwest from Unicom for $5 billion. Overseas it purchased two UK coal-fired plants from PowerGen, and EME's 40%-owned Indonesian plant came online despite problems with the successor government to Suharto. The next year EME CEO Edward Muller (who had held the post since 1994) abruptly resigned, and Edison bought Citizens Power from the Peabody Group.

SCE agreed in 2000 to sell its stakes in two plants in Arizona and New Mexico to Pinnacle West for $550 million. The company also agreed to sell its 56% stake in the Mohave plant to AES for $533 million.

Later that year SCE got caught in a price squeeze brought on in part by deregulation. Prices on the wholesale power market soared, but the utility was unable to pass along the increase to customers because of a rate freeze. In 2001 SCE suspended about $600 million in payments to creditors and suppliers. The company gained some prospect of relief when California's governor signed legislation that will allow a state agency to buy power from wholesalers under long-term contracts. In addition, the state Public Utilities Commission approved a substantial increase in retail electricity rates.