Hawaiian Electric seeks solar-plus-storage in following procurement round

• US utility Hawaiian Electric is looking for proposals from resources consisting of solar-plus-storage as part of its newest "all-source" renewables procurement round.

A freshly filed draft Request for Proposals (RfP) specifies that solar PV projects have to be integrated with a four-hour period battery energy storage space system (BESS). Those colocated battery systems need to be allowed to bill straight from the grid "in order to extract higher integrity and also durability take advantage of these sources", the energy stated.

The draft RfP is for the third stage of Hawaiian Electric's renewables procurement programme for capability on Hawaii Island and also looks for capability and grid services for the eastern side of the island.

The energy intends to introduce the RfP by the end of February 2022 after it has attracted comment from the area, interested events and also potential participants as well as Hawaii's regulative Public Utilities Payment (PUC).

While it then anticipates to make its choice and also begin agreement arrangements late following year, projects in the RfP will have up until 2030 to browse the web. Hawaiian Electric stated it is basing this method on a Grid Needs Assessment which revealed there is enough system capability to be able to wait to get dispatchable renewable energy and also power storage space sources.

The first 2 phases of the purchase rounds for Hawaii Island picked regarding 132MW of generation with 492MWh of storage for Hawaii Island. The PUC instructed the utility to procure simply over 200MW of capacity for the island as part of a larger procurement for all of the Hawaiian islands, for regarding 900MW of renewables and power storage space.

The utility last year sent eight contracts standing for virtually 300MW of solar and around 2,000 MWh of power storage space for islands of O'ahu and Maui for approval to the PUC.