How utilities use EO data to get ahead of vegetation

Fixed-cycle trimming is a bet that vegetation grows at the same rate everywhere. It does not. A five-year rotation over-trims slow corridors and under-trims fast ones, and the outage report always names a span that was two years from its scheduled visit.

Weekly satellite revisit changes the economics. Current constellations image most North American service territories every few days, at resolutions good enough to measure canopy proximity to conductors span by span. The workflow is a pipeline, not a project: imagery lands, a risk model scores every circuit against growth rate and outage history, and the trim plan re-ranks itself.

The organizational shift matters more than the sensors. Crews stop working a calendar and start working a ranked list, and the ranking is auditable — every score traces back to an image with a date on it. When a regulator asks why a corridor was trimmed in March instead of May, the answer is a map, not a memo.