A fictional electric utility.
A real creative practice.
Everything here connects to the grid.
BEPCO is a fictional electric utility company brought to life as a real creative project. It explores the aesthetics, mythology, and culture of electric power systems through a familiar, playful medium emphasized through physical modeling, institutional world-building, and design.
Brickworks Electric & Power Company was founded in 1897 by Ezra Brickwell in Brickenridge, an Appalachian town in the Virginia–West Virginia borderlands. It grew into a large, investor-owned utility whose territory ran from the mountain ridges on the West Virginia line, through the rolling Piedmont, down to the tidewater lowlands of the coast. Its history is organized across three historical eras and many operational departments.
What Brickworks leaves behind is its records. Operating reports, one-line diagrams, equipment designs, and field notes fill a working archive that serves as the institutional memory of everything the company ever built, maintained, or retired.
"Build it to outlast the man who built it."
— E. Brickwell, 1908 · Western DivisionThat archive is not self-keeping. Its charge falls to a single figure — The Curator — whose mission is stranger than mere record-keeping: to catalogue not only how the grid works, but how it looks. The structures, the drawings, the particular dignity of a transmission line — recorded for posterity, before their years of service fade from our collective memory.
— 1945
— 1994
— Present
BEPCO Studio is the real entity behind the fictional universe. Everything it makes is at once a physical object or experience and an entry in a hundred-year archive, all of it organized around the BEPCO universe and the real electric grid that inspired it.
A finished MOC is more than a model on a shelf. It arrives with a place in the world: a date, a division, a corridor it belonged to. The object and its story are never separated.
BEPCO Studio operates out of Richmond, Virginia, and takes an unlikely subject seriously: the machinery that keeps the lights on. It exists to do one thing well, turning the infrastructure most people never notice into something you can hold, build, and care about. The aim is to make the grid legible, beautiful, and worth a second look, through the most disarming medium there is and the institutional fiction built around it.
Every artifact in the BEPCO universe carries a reference code. It opens with the institution — BEPCO — then a layer bit: R for the real studio, F for the fictional utility, followed by the record type and serial; MOCs add a dotted endcap to tell their contexts apart. Identification is handled by the record type and serial tuple, with the address space only shared within a given record type. The MOC endcap differentiates between the Archive record, the Shop record, the Instruction Booklet, or a physical kit.
Kevin D. Jones is a transmission technology professional based in Richmond, Virginia, where his work centers on the torrents of time-series sensor data a modern grid generates, and the specialized technology stacks and data infrastructure required to turn that raw signal into insight.
BEPCO is the creative project he builds alongside that career. It is his attempt to make the subject he works in every day legible and beautiful to people who have never once thought about where their electricity comes from, starting with the towers they drive past without noticing.
The fiction is earnest because the subject deserves earnestness, and the medium is deliberate: bricks make the infrastructure approachable without ever making it trivial.