Renewable Energy World Asia 2015 Conference

Sessions Speakers

Development & Demonstration of Smart Inverters for High Penetration PV Applications (Room Jupiter 7)

The growth of distributed PV installations in Hawaii have essentially doubled every year since 2006 to the point where now more than 10% of the residential customers serviced by the utilities in Hawaii have PV systems. This exponential growth has raised concerns, and opportunities, regarding the power quality and safety of the distribution system as the growth of these distributed generating resources continue. In order to address some of these concerns and take advantage of the opportunities, the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, in partnership with selected technology vendors, is implementing a smart grid PV inverter project on the island of Maui. The focus of this technology development and demonstration project is to implement, on operating utility distribution feeders with “very high” penetration of rooftop PV, enhanced capability smart inverters to achieve improved operational performance, efficiency, control and visibility via standards based communications technology. This will be accomplished by creating, deploying, and evaluating new smart inverters using integrated inverter management control software and standards-based communications systems. In addition, detailed distribution modeling (modeled from the utility substation down to the home meter) will be employed to aid in development of inverter control algorithms/settings and the model will be validated using high resolution field data monitoring to capture inverter field performance. The project will test these different inverter control strategies in two project deployment locations – Maui, Hawai’i and Maryland/Washington D.C. The main control objective for the Maui location is to control voltage on the feeder to maintain power quality and improve efficiency via enhanced conservation voltage reduction schemes. The Maryland/Washington D.C. deployment will focus on curtailment controls to enable higher PV penetration levels on networked secondary systems.