With a goal of improving operational budgets and efficiency, Delaware Electric Cooperative turned to satellites and artificial intelligence to help optimize its cycle-based approach to vegetation management. Rather than prioritizing the number of miles trimmed around its network alone, the co-op shifted to prioritize work plans in high risk, high impact areas to make the most of its budget. Without overhauling its existing process, DEC has used satellite intelligence to project both an 18% decrease in total miles trimmed as well as a 14% improvement in SAIDI overall, adding newfound flexibility to its vegetation management work and budget.

Presentation Takeaways

• How vegetation intelligence and prioritization across its network has helped DEC allocate operations budget intelligently for SAIDI

• How electric utilities can use artificial intelligence to improve reliability in problem areas for outages caused by vegetation

• How utilities can use predictive analytics to support smarter contractor verification and lump sum bidding for their O&M budgets