Siemens is partnering with Hawaiian Electric Company to provide advanced solar grid management and control technologies for a US Department of Energy program.
The $2.5m funded SunShot Initiative is part of the Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV (SHINES) program, which aims to increase the availability of photovoltaic energy and storage for local grids.
Over the next three years, Siemens, and about 20 other commercial and industrial customers, will work with Hawaiian Electric to deploy and test SHINES technology for on-site PV, energy storage and storage integration.
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.
DERMS will interface with solar installations to provide aggregated data to the existing Siemens energy management system.
The 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 integrate renewable resources into local grids and manage demand, specifically during peak load times.
Hawaiian Electric vice president for corporate planning and business development Shelee Kimura said: “We are very happy to have Siemens as a technology partner.
“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.”
Siemens Digital Grid president Mike Carlson said: “The SunShot initiative marks an important step in bringing reliable, cost-efficient distributed generation into Hawaiian Electric’s grid systems.
“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.”
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By EBS