Photo courtesy of Hawaiian Electric Company.
By Staff Reports
(Honolulu) – By taking advantage of smart technology and federal stimulus funding, Hawaiian Electric Company has made service more reliable for customers in urban and east Honolulu.
The recently completed East Oahu Transmission Project will help speed up troubleshooting during outages and reduce restoration times in some situations from hours to minutes. The project is part of Hawaiian Electric’s overall effort to modernize Oahu’s electric system to improve service for customers. The upgrades will affect approximately 12,400 customers in the area from the university district through the Kaimuki and Kahala commercial areas.
The project involved installing equipment that can be remotely monitored and controlled at eight of Hawaiian Electric’s substations and one sub-transmission pole top switch. These systems were integrated into the overall grid utilizing a smart controller. The smart controller monitors system conditions and automatically performs system switching when an outage is detected in the project’s service area.
“To the untrained eye, it may not look like the equipment has changed much, but the capabilities of the system have vastly improved. This technology makes this part of our system more responsive and better equipped to restore outages,” said Dan Giovanni, Hawaiian Electric vice president of Energy Delivery.
About one-third of the $15.4 million project budget came from federal stimulus funding, reducing the overall cost to customers. The $5.3 million federal award reduced the project cost to $10.1 million.
Photo courtesy of Hawaiian Electric Company.
In addition to saving money, the “smart” approach allowed Hawaiian Electric to limit the construction impacts to the surrounding community.
During the early planning stages, Hawaiian Electric had considered a different alternative to install 1.9 miles of underground sub-transmission lines between Kakaako and McCully. At a cost of $28 million, this alternative would have cost more and could have potentially tied up traffic for months on key corridors such as King Street.
The completion of this effort concludes Hawaiian Electric’s East Oahu Transmission Project, which arose out of the need to improve service reliability for more than half of our customers on Oahu. The first phase of the project was completed in 2010 and involved modifications to the company’s sub-transmission system.
Photo courtesy of Hawaiian Electric Company.
Those modifications give system operators the ability to shift power to meet customer demand while avoiding transmission overloads. They also allow system operators to restore power in seconds – as opposed to hours it would have taken for crews to reach the remote manual switches used in the past.
For a closer look at the project, go to www.youtube.com/user/HawaiianElectric.