Siemens will partner with Hawaiian Electric Company to provide advanced grid management and control technologies for the U.S. Department of Energy $2.5-million funded SunShot Initiative as a part of the Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) program. The initiative aims to increase the availability of photovoltaic (PV) energy and storage for local grids. Hawaiian Electric will use Siemens Distributed Energy Resource Management (DERMS) software solution to collect data and manage the operation of existing solar and storage systems.
“We are very happy to have Siemens as a technology partner,” said Shelee Kimura, Hawaiian Electric vice president for corporate planning and business development. “Our companies accept the highest percentage of customer-sited renewable generation in the nation and we are on the leading edge of innovation to handle this increasing two-way flow of energy on grids designed for one-way flow. This is one challenge in reaching our goals of more customer choices and lower customer costs on a 100 percent renewable energy system.”
The Siemens Distributed Energy Resource Management (DERMS) solution will interface with the solar installations to provide aggregated data to the existing Siemens energy management system. Siemens DERMS software utilizes this data which includes current active and reactive power generation, status of storage system charge, total capacity of solar photovoltaic energy, and near term load forecasts, to effectively integrate renewable resources into local grids and manage demand, specifically during peak load times.
“The SunShot initiative marks an important step in bringing reliable, cost-efficient distributed generation into Hawaiian Electric’s grid systems,” said Mike Carlson, president of Siemens Digital Grid. “Siemens software will provide Hawaiian Electric the visibility and insight necessary to manage and operate their photovoltaic systems and help prove that renewable energy can be an essential part of our 21st century energy mix.”
Over the next three years, Siemens, along with about 20 other commercial and industrial customers, will work with Hawaiian Electric to deploy and test SHINES technology for on-site PV, energy storage at high penetration PV circuits, and storage integration that’s specially sized for the customer’s electricity use.
