'Insufficient generation' helped cause TVA blackout directive, MLGW CEO says
Memphis, Light, Gas and Water CEO Doug McGowen on Wednesday attributed the Tennessee Valley Authority’s rolling blackouts in late December to “insufficient generation” within its footprint and difficulty obtaining electricity from other electric grids due to nationwide cold temperatures.
McGowen’s comments Wednesday came during an MLGW Board of Commissioners meeting, the first since rolling blackouts across TVA’s footprint put a combined 260,000 MLGW customers out of power for an average of an hour on Dec. 23 and 24.
The MLGW CEO said the lack of notice from TVA about the possibility of rolling blackouts and then changing orders to increase the number of customers without power made it harder to institute the blackouts and caused customer frustrations.
The city-owned utility – and 152 other local power companies – were first told to cut 5% of its power and then told to cut 10% 20 minutes later.
What McGowen said Wednesday is not much different than what he said on the afternoon of Dec. 24 -- after the blackouts had ended – and in the days after.
However, the MLGW CEO again commenting on TVA’s communication issues during the storm and blaming insufficient generation and lack of imported electricity puts responsibility for the blackouts clearly on TVA and offers a view of what MLGW thinks went wrong last month.
MLGW represents 10% of TVA’s electric load and revenue. It spent four years considering whether it should leave the federal power provider. The MLGW board voted last month for the utility to stay on its current evergreen contract rather than TVA's offer of a 20-year-deal.
McGowen’s comments also come after TVA CEO Jeff Lyash said the federal power provider could have performed better during the deep freeze that blanketed its footprint and much of the United States. TVA also said last week that it will conduct a formal review of what happened.
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Two regulatory bodies – the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the North American Electrical Reliability Corporation – have also said they will conduct reviews of TVA’s rolling blackouts and the blackouts that took place within Duke Energy’s footprint in the Carolinas.
MLGW will be sending some of its personnel to TVA as part of the agency’s analysis of what went wrong during the deep freeze, McGowen said. He said the city-of-Memphis-owned utility is also conducting its own “after action” report about how it performed during the storm.
Commissioners skeptical of "once-in-a-generation" event
MLGW board members, citizen volunteers who are appointed by the Memphis mayor, expressed some skepticism about TVA’s claims that the cold snap was a “once in a generation event,” a talking point the federal agency circulated during and after the freeze.
“OK. I don’t know about that,” Commissioner Mike Pohlman, CEO of local engineering firm Pickering, Inc., said.
“Hold TVA’s feet to the fire,” Commissioner Cheryl Pesce, a Memphis businesswoman, said to McGowen Wednesday. She and Commissioner Carl Person, a former FedEx executive turned entrepreneur, and Commissioner Mitch Graves, CEO of West Cancer Center, all praised McGowen’s leadership during the crisis, which came during his third week on the job.
“[I] would not have wanted to go through that without Doug McGowen,” Pesce said.
McGowen said if the utility had more notice of rolling blackouts in the future, it would release a more detailed plan of how the blackouts would proceed.
CEO says water system performed better because of improvements
McGowen said $50 million in recent improvements made to repair and harden the utility's water distribution system helped prevent the recent water crisis from being much worse. The deep freeze of 2021, which resulted in pumping stations failing and a lengthy boil advisory, forced MLGW to repair and replace infrastructure as well as learn to combat a water crisis.
The funding for such infrastructure repairs came from rate hikes that passed in 2019 and 2020 and pay for what is known as the MLGW Way Forward plan, a $1.2 billion infrastructure package.
"Because we were making investments in our system so we were able to keep the pressure at more houses and avoid losing one more house than we did in 2021," McGowen said.
Samuel Hardiman covers Memphis city government and politics for The Commercial Appeal. He can be reached by email at samuel.hardiman@commercialappeal.com or followed on Twitter at @samhardiman.
This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Doug McGowen MLGW CEO TVA Rolling Blackouts
