Case Study: Central Virginia Electric Cooperative cuts SAIDI with Overstory

How Central Virginia Electric Cooperative is Cutting SAIDI

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative (CVEC) faced the significant challenge of tree-related power outages, which accounted for over 80% of its annual events and kept its SAIDI reliability metric 75% above target. Traditional cycle trimming alone was insufficient. CVEC needed a way to proactively identify and prioritize the specific hazard trees most likely to cause outages to reduce operational costs and improve service for its 39,000 members. To address this, they partnered with Overstory.

By integrating Overstory's AI-powered remote sensing intelligence, CVEC could rank trees by their potential customer impact and historical outage likelihood. This data allowed them to strategically target removals. As a result, fall-in-related SAIDI dropped from 94% to 70%, and crews removed over 7,000 hazard trees in one year. Overstory’s solution enabled CVEC to move to a data-driven, defensible vegetation management strategy that significantly boosted grid reliability.

Central Virginia Electric Cooperative

Mark Moreno

Vice President of Reliability and Field Engineering