Imagine an electric grid that keeps your lights on while the rest of the island’s grid is dark during a natural disaster or outage.
That’s the promise at Kahauiki Village, a community for formerly homeless families near Sand Island. The village has its own independent power grid, or microgrid, that’s powered by solar panels, a battery and a backup generator. The village only draws power from the utility when there’s not enough sunlight and battery charge to meet its energy needs, so its microgrid operates off the islandwide grid 98% of the time, says Paul Orem, CEO of PhotonWorks Engineering, which delivered the village’s electrical infrastructure. The backup generator is used as a last resort, when the utility grid is down.
Microgrids can take a variety of forms but are not a new concept. Ted Borer, a board member of the Microgrid Resources Coalition and energy plant director at Princeton University, says microgrids existed in the U.S. in the late 1800s when there were no interconnecting electric utilities. Newer technology has refined them with better materials, digital controls and the ability to run faster, he says, and people use them today for their potential to provide added reliability, independence, cost savings and resiliency.
The state Public Utilities Commission, Hawaiian Electric Cos., Microgrid Resources Coalition, Distributed Energy Resources Council of Hawaii, Ulupono Initiative and three others are working to create a microgrid services tariff to encourage microgrid development in the Islands. The Public Utilities Commission proceeding was opened in response to a 2018 state law and will address several issues, including the rules for microgrids to interconnect with the Hawaiian Electric grids and the value of microgrid benefits and services.
Marc Asano, director of transmission and distribution and interconnection planning at Hawaiian Electric Co., says the utility’s goal is to create a tariff that encourages a more resilient grid.
“We want to encourage development of resources that can power the grid during grid outages or if some natural disaster were to hit and our infrastructure would not be able to withstand that, that we can still deliver a level of service especially to critical loads on the island,” he says. Critical loads include hospitals, police stations, military bases and other facilities that must always be powered. “But how we get there is part of what’s getting discussed in the docket.”
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