How We Got Here From There and How Easy It Is To Regress

Jan. 23, 2011

This presentation provides the evolution of what was considered the state of the art utility VM program. It also illustrates the causes and symptoms of returning to a state of underfunding the VM program. One of the earliest pieces of work connecting the impact of underfunding on future outage expectations and costs to return to a sustainable VM program with a steady state of the lowest possible outages for the chosen clearance standard.Read more...

TransAlta Utilities Corporation in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, implemented a fully integrated distribution line clearance (arboriculture) program in 1986. The need for a comprehensive work management program arose from the fact that budgets, outages, and customer complaints were increasing due to tree and conductor conflicts.

Implementation of a twelve year, long term program took committed company and contractor staff, senior management support, and a comprehensive work management (reporting) system to measure progress.

TransAlta Utilities arboriculture program has delivered the desired results forecast in 1986. Like many utilities around the globe, there is ongoing change and challenge. Given deregulation and budget restraints, the challenge today is to preserve for our customers the benefits achieved from the investment made in the arboriculture program...