Supercharge vegetation management and outage prediction with artificial intelligence

Relying on last year's weather to predict this year's power outages is an increasingly risky proposition. Climate change is shifting weather patterns in every region, increasing the frequency and severity of storms, wind, and drought. For example, in the wake of the recent tropical storm Isaias, Con Edison suffered its second-largest outage ever, mainly due to damage from trees in high winds. According to Con Ed: "The storm's gusting winds shoved trees and branches onto power lines, bringing those lines and other equipment down and leaving 257,000 customers out of power. The destruction surpassed Hurricane Irene, which caused 204,000 customer outages in August 2011."