Everyone in energy knows the concept: It’s not always the storm that does the damage but it’s impact on the trees.
That’s why FirstEnergy Corp., the parent company of Jersey Central Power & Light, is among the first in the electric utility industry to deploy a new program that helps predict and reduce tree-related outages before they occur across the company’s six-state service area.
The company said its vegetation management team has engineered an AI-driven program to calculate where trees pose the most risk to the electric system, particularly ahead of winter and summer storm seasons.
Known as the Advanced Vegetation Analytics Tool, the prediction model pulls data – including soil, weather, roadway, historical outage data, geographical typography and high-resolution aerial patrol photos – from several internal and external databases. The data sets work together to identify patterns and calculate the likelihood of a tree coming down on a power line or equipment to ensure problematic trees are swiftly addressed. (see video here)
Tyler Woody, general manager of distribution vegetation management operations at FirstEnergy, said the potential impact of the program can be great.
“Not only is this tool helping us to keep the electricity flowing safely and reliably to our customers, but it is also helping us manage crews and our budget more efficiently,” he said.
“By using this data tool to study the type of vegetation conditions in each area and the proximity to our power lines, we can better recommend the right type of equipment crews and contractors will need to bring with them to trim the first time they go out.”
Woody said the new AVAT tool complements FirstEnergy’s comprehensive annual vegetation management methods, which involve professional tree crews assessing vegetation across the service area to determine the best approach to prevent trees from interfering with electrical facilities. In addition, the company conducts proactive aerial inspections of transmission and distribution lines using helicopters equipped with infrared and ultraviolet technology.
This work helps ensure that high-voltage power lines and equipment remain clear of trees and vegetation that cannot be observed from the ground inspections, Woody said.
Based on inspection findings, the company may use aerial saws, mechanical equipment or a combination of methods to control the vegetation, Woody said. Crews also trim trees along FirstEnergy’s rights-of-way on a four-year cycle.
Trees are the leading cause of power outages across the entire electric utility industry – and certainly at First Energy, whose transmission subsidiaries operate approximately 24,000 miles of transmission lines that connect the Midwest and Mid-Atlantic regions.
FirstEnergy’s service territory in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia and a small portion of New York encompasses some of the most densely forested areas in the country, with terrain varying from urban areas and flat agricultural land to rugged mountainous conditions more than 3,000 feet in elevation.
These widely varying conditions can make vegetation management a challenge. That always has been easy to predict.
