National Grid plc
British multinational electricity and gas utility company
National Grid plc is a British multinational electricity and gas utility company headquartered in London, England. Its principal activities are in Great Britain, where it owns and operates electricity and natural gas transmission networks, and in the Northeastern United States, where as well as operating transmission networks, the company produces and supplies electricity and gas, providing both to customers in New York and Massachusetts.
National Grid plc is one of the largest investor-owned utility companies in the world; it has a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange where it is a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index, and a secondary listing in the form of its American depositary receipts on the New York Stock Exchange.
History
Background (CEGB before 1990)
Before 1990, both the generation and transmission activities in England and Wales were under the responsibility of the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB). The present electricity market in the United Kingdom was built upon the breakup of the CEGB into four separate companies in the 1990s.
Its generation (or upstream) activities were transferred to three generating companies — PowerGen, National Power, and Nuclear Electric (later British Energy, eventually EDF Energy)—and its transmission (or downstream) activities to the National Grid Company.
National Grid and acquisitions (1990–1999)
In 1990, the transmission activities of the CEGB were transferred to the National Grid Company plc, which was owned by the twelve regional electricity companies (RECs) through a holding company, National Grid Group plc. The company was first listed on the London Stock Exchange in December 1995.
Expansion and consolidation (2000–2015)
With the beginning of the new millennium, National Grid pursued mergers and international acquisitions. In March 2000, National Grid Group acquired United States companies New England Electric System and Eastern Utilities Associates.
“National Grid plc” enters the record as british multinational electricity and gas utility company. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what National, Grid and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 7, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1465461. VIAF identifies the subject as 158745966. The Library of Congress control number is nr2004025840. 2 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1990, 1999, 1995 and 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “National Grid plc” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.