Targeting the Right Trees: How Central Virginia Electric Cooperative is Cutting SAIDI

CVEC serves 39,000+ members across 3,000 miles of overhead line—much of it in mountainous and heavily forested terrain. Vegetation drove 80%+ of their annual outages, and time-based trimming alone couldn’t move their SAIDI target.

By integrating Overstory’s hazard tree intelligence, the team removed the right trees, not more trees—streamlining contractor workflows, reducing emergency callouts, and improving member experience.

Key takeaways:

• How CVEC identified hazard trees with the biggest reliability impact
• How they achieved measurable reliability gains, including a drop from 94% to ~70% fall-in-related SAIDI
• How CVEC is now optimizing vegetation management cycles for long-term resilience

“The only thing we changed was starting to use [Overstory’s] intelligence. It allowed us to be proactive with hazard trees.”

— Mark Moreno, VP of Reliability and Field Engineering, CVEC