MLGW's Grid Is Getting Better. For 17 Percent of Customers, It Is Getting Worse.

MEMPHIS, Tenn. - Start by giving Memphis Light, Gas and Water the credit it is owed, because it has earned some.

Four years ago this utility was a running joke with a body count of ruined refrigerators. A February 2022 ice storm knocked out power to more than 200,000 customers. In 2022 alone, nearly 74,000 households lost power three or more times, and MLGW customers collectively endured roughly 172 million minutes of interrupted service, a figure that excludes major storm events. Tree trimming, the single most boring and most effective thing an electric utility does, was reportedly close to 30 years behind schedule. When Memphians said the lights went out every time the wind blew, they were not exaggerating.

Then the City Council approved a rate increase in 2023, phased over three years, and MLGW went to work. Crews have now completed more than 4,220 miles of tree trimming. Transformers and substation breakers have been replaced. An automated system now reroutes power around a fault instead of waiting for a lineman to find it. When a winter storm hit this year, Memphis largely kept the lights on.

President and CEO Doug McGowen did not oversell it. He said the utility has significantly improved reliability in three years, and that it still has work to do.

He was righter than the headline suggests.

The 17 percent

Buried in the same data showing citywide improvement is a number that should be the story.

Seventeen percent of MLGW customers still experience three or more power outages a year. And that figure is getting worse, year over year.

Read those two sentences together. The average is improving. The worst-served customers are losing power more often than they used to, not less. A citywide average can improve while the bottom fifth of the city gets worse, and that is exactly what appears to be happening.

MLGW knows where these customers are. McGowen has said some of the infrastructure in the oldest neighborhoods predates central air conditioning. He named Castalia Heights, in South Memphis, as the next neighborhood slated for a complete overhead-to-underground overhaul, similar to work already finished in Orange Mound. Asked about the customers in those neighborhoods, McGowen said he is sorry for the inconvenience.

Carolyn Goodwin has run a childcare center in Castalia Heights for 32 years. A short outage she can absorb. A long one, and she has said she has had long ones, means she closes. That is not an inconvenience. That is a small business losing a day of revenue and a working parent losing a day of childcare, repeatedly, in a neighborhood that has been waiting its turn.

Every one of those customers paid the same rate increase as everyone else.

What the money bought

The rate increase was 12 percent, phased across three years, with the final 4 percent landing on bills in January 2026. For the average residential customer it added roughly $5 a month.

The utility has been specific about the program it funds. It calls the work its Renewal and Replacement of Infrastructure initiative, and its centerpiece is a grid modernization program MLGW says will not be finished until 2029.

Part of that program is genuinely novel. MLGW selected Nokia to build a private 5G wireless network across Memphis and Shelby County, making it the first municipal utility in the United States to run a full-scale standalone private 5G network. It is meant to let the grid talk to itself, detecting a fault and rerouting around it in real time rather than waiting on a crew. Phase one is designed to cover roughly 93 percent of Shelby County.

Here is a figure that has not appeared in local coverage. According to the telecom analyst firm SNS Telecom and IT, reported by Fierce Network, MLGW acquired the 600 MHz spectrum for the network from Bluewater Wireless for $27 million, and the estimated value of the multi-year 5G deployment is about $31 million.

That is not an accusation. A utility buying dedicated spectrum so its grid can communicate during a storm may be an entirely sound investment, and MLGW has made a reasonable public case for it. But a public utility spending tens of millions of dollars acquiring wireless spectrum licenses is the kind of thing ratepayers should learn about from their utility, in a board meeting, and not from a trade publication quoting an analyst.

And one more thing, for 2027

McGowen has said additional electric rate increases are probably not coming.

He also said Memphians should prepare for possible water and gas rate increases in 2027.

Remember that when it arrives, and remember that the argument for it will sound exactly like the argument for the last one.

Why It Matters for Memphis

MLGW is not a company. It is the largest three-service public power utility in the country, it serves more than 420,000 customers, and it belongs to the people who pay its bills. Its rates are set with the approval of the City Council, which means every increase is a political decision as much as a financial one.

The utility told Memphis that a rate increase would buy a more reliable grid. On the citywide numbers, it did. That should be said clearly, and it should count for something the next time MLGW comes asking.

But a citywide average is a political instrument as much as a statistic. It lets an institution report success while the people with the worst service watch it get worse. Seventeen percent of MLGW customers are in that category, and they are disproportionately in the oldest and poorest parts of this city, and their outage counts are climbing while the average falls.

Castalia Heights is next. Orange Mound has already been done. That leaves a question nobody has been asked to answer in public: who is after Castalia Heights, and in what order, and who decided?

Because until 2029, that sequence is the whole ballgame. Being early on the list means your childcare center stays open. Being late means you keep paying the same rate for a grid that keeps failing.

The Oversight Question

The easy version of this story is that MLGW failed. It did not. The grid is measurably better and the utility deserves to say so.

The harder version is the one that matters. When a public utility raises everyone's rates equally and delivers improvements unequally, the improvement is not the only thing that was distributed. So was the waiting. Somebody is always at the back of the line, and in Memphis it is not random which neighborhoods keep ending up there.

MLGW has the data. It cited the 17 percent figure itself. It knows which neighborhoods those customers live in, because it has already picked the next one.

So publish the list. All of it, in order, with the criteria. A utility that can show it is fixing the worst-served neighborhoods first has an unanswerable argument for its next rate increase. One that will not show the list is asking Memphis to take its word for it, which is precisely the arrangement the last three years were supposed to end.

Your city. Your money. Your receipts.