Managing Tree-Caused Electric Service Interruptions

Throughout their one hundred year history, utilities have been challenged by tree-conductor conflicts. On transmission systems tree-conductor contacts can have devastating results as demonstrated by the fact that trees were involved in the last three major cascading outage events in North America. For many utilities, trees are the number one cause of unplanned distribution outages. Across the utility industry, tree-related outages commonly comprise 20% to 50% of all unplanned distribution outages. While these percentages indicate trees are a major threat to reliability, the convention of excluding outage statistics arising from severe storm events means the extent of the problem is, in fact, understated....(Read more...)