Rooftop solar and battery storage on Hawaiian Electric grids reach historic milestone

Hawaiian Electric announced today that customer-sited rooftop solar and battery storage connected to its grids have surpassed 1 gigawatt of generating capacity — the equivalent of about 100 million LED lightbulbs.

The achievement comes about 25 years after the company launched its first solar programs and began addressing the technical challenges of integrating large amounts of intermittent solar energy. Today, Hawaiian Electric’s service area has one of the highest rooftop solar adoption rates in the nation, with an estimated 44% of single-family homes equipped with solar systems.

Helped by steady customer demand, the rated capacity of rooftop solar systems and battery
storage has more than doubled over the past 10 years.

“This is a major accomplishment both in terms of providing our customers the ability to adopt
clean energy technologies and helping reduce Hawaiʻi’s dependence on imported oil,” said
Kaiulani Shinsato, Hawaiian Electric Customer Energy Resources co-director. “It’s also a
testament to the hard work of the staff at Hawaiian Electric to develop customer-friendly
renewable energy programs over the years, working closely with the solar industry and other
stakeholders under the oversight of the Public Utilities Commission.”

Moviegoers may be most familiar with the term “gigawatt” from the “Back to the Future”
franchise, in which 1.21 gigawatts of power sent a DeLorean traveling through time. In reality,
according to the US Department of Energy, 1 gigawatt is equivalent to:

• 100 million LED light bulbs
• 1,887,000 solar panels
• 294 wind turbines
• 2,627 Tesla Model 3s or
• 0.5 Hoover Dams