When planting around electric facilities, this graphic helps you to determine the best type of trees that will provide beauty and not encroach on equipment. For more information visit arborday.org.

Your Cooperative is taking steps to attack right-of-way clearing, or ROW, in the most efficient manner. This requires looking at things from a different perspective.

The Co-op's ROW program helps keep the 4,765 miles of electric line clear and free of debris. It includes spraying an environmentally safe compound, as well as trimming trees interfering with electric service.

This is all done in an effort to provide reliable and safe electric service to you. In order to do this in a cost-effective way, the Cooperative has partnered with a company called AiDash.

AiDash takes an innovative approach to ROW by using satellites and algorithms to establish trimming and maintenance schedules for our electric system.

This is done by tracking the growth of plants. The ability to do this could help cut down on scheduling and work costs for the Cooperative by sending crews to specifically targeted areas.

AiDash protects a quarter of a million miles of overhead line in 35 states and on three continents.

AiDash uses programming that identifies changes from historical satellite imagery to understand growth rates, tree density and tree health, while also measuring radial clearance of vegetation on overhead lines. Being able to look at right-of-way clearing in such a quantifiable way helps resources to be better dedicated to combat and control growth.

The company's intelligent vegetation-management system combines the power of high-resolution, multi-spectral satellite imagery, artificial intelligence, and predictive analytics to optimize work, minimizing on-site inspections as well as predicting risk zones.

Growth-prediction capabilities provide real-time insight into growth rates of vegetation and calculate the rate at which it may spread beyond clearance levels over the years. Again, making it easier to plan and prepare.

It could help to reduce costs significantly, allowing the Cooperative to allocate budgets even more effectively for vegetation management while maintaining reliability.