One of New England’s earliest incorporated towns, Rowley was founded in 1635 along Massachusetts’ North Shore by a group of English Puritan families within the broader Massachusetts Bay Colony. During the Revolutionary War, volunteers from the town, known as the Rowley Minute Men, fought in notable events including the Battle of Bunker Hill.
| Population | 6,358 |
| Electric customers | 3,101 |
| Utility formed | 1910 |
| Utility employees | 8 |
Over the centuries of its existence, the town has balanced embracing its history with supporting a vibrant civic life. Rowley residents voted overwhelmingly to establish a municipal lighting system in the early 1900s, with Rowley Municipal Light Plant formally founded in 1910. It had just 32 electric customers in its first year of operation. Over the following decades, Rowley built out and strengthened its electric system, especially after a period of rapid population growth and local development in the 1980s.
The public power utility strives to uphold both exceptional service quality and strong community ties.
“One of the best parts of Rowley is that small-town feel of neighbor helping neighbor,” said RMLP General Manager Matt Brown. “Whether it’s a residential homeowner or a business owner in town, you really do get to know people. You’re out here every day grabbing a coffee, you’re grabbing lunch, you’re supporting their business. You’re aware of what’s going on in town, and there’s a sense of commitment and responsibility to help the people who you’ve come to know.”
Brown said RMLP employees are attuned to and take great pride in being able to provide high-quality service with a high level of connection to the community, which he expressed was possible with public power. “When you work for an [investor-owned utility], you don’t have that sense of community and responsibility because you might live 50 minutes away and not even know anyone who lives in town.”
These values have also informed RMLP’s attentiveness around system improvements and investments in the town’s grid.
“Any money we make, we put back into our system, which we’re constantly updating. If we see something that’s a potential problem, it gets addressed quickly,” he said.
For its accomplishments, RMLP has been recognized by APPA with a 2025 Certificate of Excellence in Reliability and was designated as a Smart Energy Provider in 2025.
RMLP staff members are closely involved with community events, which Brown described as a year-round commitment. “The line crew sets up the flags on Memorial Day, July Fourth, and Veterans Day. They decorate the [Rowley Town] Common with Christmas lights every year and are there for the Girl Scouts’ tree-lighting ceremony. They also help the highway department load the sanders into the trucks in wintertime.”
RMLP also publishes a quarterly newsletter as part of its community engagement and outreach efforts.
RMLP is looking to continue building out its distribution infrastructure to improve system reliability, with Brown noting the utility is on track to complete a major substation upgrade by the close of 2026. The utility is also working to replace its remaining copper wire with Hendrix tree wire. These grid buildouts are designed to get ahead of increasing electrification and customer adoption of solar.
Like other public power utilities throughout Massachusetts’ North Shore, RMLP is also looking to meet the benchmarks laid out in the state’s 2025 Decarbonization Roadmap, and it recently secured a power purchase agreement to source affordable energy from FirstLight hydroelectric.
Brown emphasized that this level of accomplishment wouldn’t have been possible without the dedication from RMLP’s staff and commissioners.
“For a small, local utility like us, it really comes down to the quality of the people. They’re the reason we are where we are today,” he said.
