Come join the Young Professionals in Energy Honolulu Chapter for our monthly event.

We're meeting at Murphy’s Bar & Grill this month. We will discuss distribution grid monitoring technology and how it's being used to overcome challenges of increasing PV in Hawaii. Dr. Kevin Davies from HNEI will present and lead the discussion.

Kevin Davies will first cover some of the key technical challenges limiting further adoption of rooftop PV on the electric grid, including thermal limits, transient overvoltages, and voltage flicker at the distribution level as well as the “duck curve” and frequency regulation at the system level. In this context, we will discuss the importance of enhanced monitoring and coordination of distributed energy resources (DERs) to help ensure grid reliability and stability. Next, we will introduce current products in this space including Grid 20/20's low-fidelity distribution service transformer power monitor (800+ deployed by HECO on Oahu) and central DER aggregation and control platforms such as OATI’s webSmartEnergy system (recently awarded a power purchase agreement with HECO). Finally, we will present a novel, patent-pending distribution grid monitoring technology being developed at the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute (see https://www.hnei.hawaii.edu/projects/argems) that has the potential to provide tighter, localized coordination and increased grid situational awareness at a price competitive with existing low-fidelity grid power monitors.

Bio: Dr. Kevin Davies is an assistant researcher at HNEI currently focusing on the grid integration of renewable energy. With a background in mechanical, electrical, as well as computer engineering, he seeks to connect systems-level analysis and optimization to detailed physical models and the design of practical hardware and software solutions. Prior to renewable integration, he focused on multi-domain fuel cell modeling and also was an engineer at Ford Motor Company on alternative fuel vehicles.