We love trees, but not near our lines.
Trees cause around a quarter of all power cuts on our electricity network each year. Many serious outages in storms are caused by trees or branches being blown into lines. Overgrown trees also make it difficult for our crews to restore power.
To help keep the power on for our customers, we run a cyclical vegetation management programme across our network.
This proactive approach sees us manage each tree site at least once during the cycle period.
Cycles are designed to achieve the best balance of network reliability and cost-effectiveness, and are split into three areas:
Tauranga, Waikato and Thames Valley – 3 yearly cycle
Taranaki, Whanganui and Manawatu – 4-yearly cycle
Wairarapa – 5-yearly cycle
In areas where our most critical assets are, we carry out annual inspections to trim or remove vegetation.
Proactive management of the vegetation around our network is important as it affects how many power outages our customers experience in the short-term, and the overall reliability of our network in the long-term.
While removing trees is necessary for keeping our network safe and reliable for our customers, we support planting native trees in areas away from our powerlines. That’s why we’ve partnered with Asplundh (one of our contractors) and Wild for Taranaki for Replant for Tomorrow.
See our updates below for more information about how we manage vegetation each year.
