Top 5 Vegetation Management Stories of 2025

It's the most wonderful time of year for countdowns and top 10 lists. To jump in on the trend, we wanted to share our top 5 vegetation management articles from this year. These articles were the most visited news, features or commentaries on our Vegetation Management Resource Center. 

These five leading articles reflect a major shift in how utilities approach vegetation management, from reactive, labor-intensive tree trimming, to data-driven, risk-based programs that prioritize safety, reliability, and resilience. Collectively, they highlight the industry’s increasing reliance on technology (satellite imagery, AI, remote sensing), large-scale grid modernization, and a renewed focus on safety and preventative maintenance as utilities contend with growing outage risks, severe weather, and regulatory pressure.

LUMA's Modernization Projects Continue with Transformer Replacement and Vegetation Clearing

Coming in as our most popular article on UVM is a news story from Puerto Rico. Everyone is definitely watching what's happening there after Hurricane Maria devastated the island in 2017. This article describes how LUMA Energy is investing over $630 million (via funding from FEMA) to overhaul Puerto Rico’s aging substations and transmission system. The program includes not only transformer replacements and breaker upgrades, but also a major vegetation-clearing initiative: more than 660 miles of power lines will be cleared in several high-population regions to reduce outage risks and improve grid resilience.  Read here. 

The Future of Utility Vegetation Management: Embracing Innovation for Resilience and Safety

This article written by T&D World Technical Editor Gene Wolf presents a forward-looking view of utility vegetation management (UVM), arguing that next-gen tools — such as AI, satellite imagery, LiDAR, and real-time weather forecasting — are transforming UVM. Gene outlines how these technologies enable proactive risk detection and targeted interventions, shifting operations away from reactive maintenance toward strategic, resilience-oriented management. Read here.

'Safety First' in Utility Vegetation Management—Right?

This article, coming in at third place, was contributed by a Randall Miller of Eocene Environmental Group and is a powerful perspective that emphasizes safety as the primary goal of UVM. Miller recounts tragic real-world incidents to illustrate the severe consequences when vegetation contacts power lines, and argues that even as reliability and cost pressures grow, safety must remain the top priority, before efficiency, before schedule, before bottom lines. This commentary was also featured in our T&D World/Utility Arborist Association Vegetation Management supplement with the June issue. Read here.

Outsmart Vegetation-Related Power Outages

This more in-depth feature was actually published in 2022 but readers keep coming back to it. Contributed by Brian Hoff at GE Digital, this feature makes the economic and operational case for using data, analytics, and AI/ML to modernize vegetation management. It cites findings that utilities spending hundreds of millions per year on vegetation programs can dramatically cut forced outages and reduce risk of fires or widespread outages by adopting automated detection and decision tools rather than relying on manual inspection and scheduling. Read here.

Duke's Transmission Vegetation Management Transformation

Rounding out our top five was another older article from 2023 but still relevant as it's Duke Energy's vegetation management story, written by JackGardner, Duke Energy’s manager for Transmission Vegetation Strategy and Support. This feature describes how Duke Energy completely revamped its transmission-level vegetation management process. By moving from interval-based trimming to a condition- and data-driven model — using remote sensing and a new work-planning platform — it improved how and when maintenance is performed, increasing reliability while optimizing resources. Read here.