Hawaii Utilizes Existing Solar Installations For Solar Energy Storage

More than 60,000 Hawaiian homeowners and businesses that have solar panel systems installed under former net metering rules to add power storage without breaking their agreement based on a ruling by state regulators

Nowhere in the United States has adopted rooftop solar quite like the beautiful state of Hawaii. Very high retail electricity costs made net-metered rooftop solar a deal in the island state well prior to the mainland, with the effect that 16-20% of all homes on different islands hosted solar panel systems by the end of 2017.

More Solar Than Continental Unites States

As this is a much more significant rate of distributed solar than anyplace in the Continental United States, this and the island’s remote grid also meant that the state’s utilities hit technological difficulties associated with deploying this solar before everyone else.

And whether or not these unique issues were an adequate and valid reason, state regulators shut off-net metering to new customers in the territory of Hawaiian Electric Companies (HECO) in 2015, alternately moving to policies that de-facto mandated joining solar with energy storage by preventing electricity exports.

But while the Hawaii Public Utilities Commission (HPUC) was pushing energy storage upon new clients who sought to install solar, they had not yet made it a sensible option for existing solar customers, as it would nullify their net metering arrangement.

This switched last Friday, with HPUC originating a mandate which approves an opportunity for customers to add energy storage to an existing net-metered installation, without adding any more solar. This goes beyond HECO’s proposal that such systems be approved for emergency back-up and will allow energy storage for other plans.

A boundary on exports to the fundamental capacity of the solar panel system under net metering is maintained, with a 1 kW variation for advanced inverters. The command further exempts these energy storage systems from a technical analysis requirement.

“The PUC has created a new market for resilient energy storage equipment,” stated Will Giese, the executive administrator of the Hawaii Solar Energy Association (HSEA) in an announcement. “By allowing existing customers new options to participate in the clean economy, we’re lowering the cost of energy storage and accelerating deployment of new renewable technologies.”

HSEA Remarks

HSEA remarks that customers wanting to add solar and storage will require to re-program their existing inverters to meet frequency and voltage criteria, where possible. HPUC also ordered HECO to work with HSEA and other stakeholders to produce an easily understood net metering change process for customers who want to supplement storage.

Such modifications have been a long time coming, as the decision is under a docket that started four years ago. The ruling also executed what HSEA has described as “minor” modifications to interconnection tariffs, as well as interconnection terminology. Ultimately, it ceased the next stage of the Distributed Energy Resources (DER) docket.

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