Central Hudson Gas and Electric serves more than 300,000 electricity customers. So when lines go down, scores of people can be without power. As extreme weather continues to increase, companies like Central Hudson are using different tools, including AI to detect and prevent outages.
As the weather grows more extreme from climate change, companies like Central Hudson have to deal with the danger of falling trees during heavy storms — just like the ones the Northeast recently experienced.
Pete McFarland, a utility forester with Central Hudson, explained that, unlike utility poles, the tree line always moving.
"It is getting bigger and heavier and weaker and taller and faster and leaning and all the stuff that a forest is going to do, completely constantly all the time," McFarland said.
To avoid costly power outages that can come from downed trees disrupting lines, the company spends lots of time working on how to prevent outages in the first place. That includes using artificial intelligence.
According to a 2025 New York comptroller’s report, Central Hudson will invest almost $30 million over the next five years in making the electric grid more resilient in the face of increasing extreme weather. This will result in an additional $2.5 million increase in cost that customers will have to pay through 2030.
The New York State Hazard Mitigation Plan found that the expected annual loss in economic growth from disasters is nearly $1.4 billion.
Joel Eline, chief Transformation Officer, explains that Central Hudson currently uses an AI model to help predict which parts of the grid to target.
“So the AI model - over a year's period, picks out about 1% of our network," Eline said. "It takes something really big and makes it really small right away. At least small relative to our 7,000 miles of overhead network. That 1% they take down to the point 1%”
The model identifies areas that have the most outages and picks out areas likely to see more in the future.
Once the model has identified areas of high importance, Central Hudson sends a screener — an experienced line clearance foreman who will go to that area in person to inspect the trees.
Crew members identify two big groups of trees that are a danger to the power lines. One called grow-in and refers to trees immediately adjacent — within 10 feet of a power line. These are cut on four-year cycles so regular maintenance takes care of most of these.
The other category, fall-in, can be much harder to evaluate. Fall-in trees are farther than 10 feet away, but if they fall, could possibly take out that line.
Central Hudson crews had their eye on one fall-in tree, but McFarland said there was another tree that was also looking a little worrying.
"If you look up top, there's a lot of open holes and a lot of rot," McFarland said. "And our guys pointed this out. There's no tag on this, so the screener missed it. But our guys are going to make it short enough before they leave so that it doesn't fall down tomorrow. I don't want that tree there, but I don't want to cut it down either.”
The process of actually bringing the tree down is not simple as it looks. From the truck with an elevated chair to insulated saws with hydraulic power, the equipment is designed specifically to work safely near an active power line. You don’t even need to touch the power line to create an outage, just get within a few feet of it.
“That corona on each one of these conductors at 13,000 volts is going to be expanded out from that wire, roughly on a day like today, hot and humid, probably three feet," McFarland said. "Anywhere from two to three feet is going to be this flow of electrons. If he lets that branch go through that flow. It will connect through that branch. 13,000 volts will go right through the water in that wood, and he will cause an outage, and we will be in trouble right now because we did it in front of the boss.”
Bringing that tree down is also an art form, McFarland explained.
“So, what he's going to do is he's going to take the lower limbs out first. So that as he gets to the higher limbs that he has to rig and drop, there's no obstacle below that," McFarland said. "So they always take the when they take trees down, they start from the bottom up.”
Unfortunately, if they did their job right, they won’t actually know if it worked, because there will be no power outage. That’s where the AI model helps them evaluate their success.
“We actually understand how much weather creates how many tree outages, and if we know where we should be seeing the outages and they don't happen, we can't really prove it did not prevent the outage," McFarland said. "But as a whole, when we start seeing a lot of numbers start staying lower than they have before, that's telling us we're going after the right things. So we know removing all the right trees.”
Eline said they have over 10 million trees that can impact their lines. In upcoming years, they plan to start using LIDAR, a 3-D scan taken by a small plane. This will allow them more fine scale data that can save them time and money by showing them individual trees.
