Central Hudson cuts outages 24%, expands AI-driven tree trimming

Orange County customers are likely to notice more bucket trucks and more cut branches after Central Hudson said a predictive trimming program helped cut customer outages by 24% in 2025. The utility is now widening that work to about 100 more locations across its eight-county territory, with crews focused on the first zone around equipment before summer storms and heat push demand higher.

Central Hudson said the result matters because tree damage is still its top cause of service interruptions. Falling trees and branches account for about 40% of all outages, the company said, across a system that includes about 7,240 miles of distribution lines and roughly 900,000 trees growing near them. The Mid-Hudson Valley is more than 60% tree-covered, which helps preserve the landscape but also raises the risk that a downed limb can knock out service in places like Orange County, where 407,470 people lived in 2023.

Chief Transformation Officer Joel Eline said the reduction showed that “innovation and predictive maintenance are making a measurable difference for homes and businesses.” Eline was named to the post on May 5, 2025, and Central Hudson said his portfolio includes asset management, project governance, vegetation management, data analytics and customer experience. That makes the tree-trimming push part of a broader operational overhaul, not just a forestry campaign.

The utility said its year-round vegetation-management program uses data and system-performance trends to target repeat trouble spots and identify trees most likely to fail, when failure is most likely and where outages could happen. Central Hudson said the approach is meant to protect scenic views while reducing outages, and that it follows state and federal reliability mandates enacted after the 2003 Northeast blackout.

Customers should expect mailed notice before work begins in their area, along with the street-level disruption that comes with trimming close to equipment. Central Hudson serves about 315,000 electric customers and 90,000 natural gas customers from the northern suburbs of New York City to the Capital District near Albany, so the work will be spread across a broad territory that includes Orange County. The company also said it filed its 2025 quarterly vegetation-management report with the New York State Department of Public Service on Sept. 4, 2025, underscoring that regulators are still watching how aggressively it trims, where it spends, and how well the program holds up during the next round of summer weather.