A primary goal of Hawaii’s Clean Energy Initiative is to increase energy efficiency and renewable energy resources to meet 70% of the state’s energy demand by 2030. As part of this initiative, Castle & Cooke Company created a 1.2 megawatt photovoltaic (PV) solar farm on Lanai, an island served by Maui Electric Company.
Before the PV system was installed, Maui Electric partnered with Sandia National Laboratories to ensure it could be integrated reliably and efficiently with the diesel generators that were already supplying the island with electricity. Sandia developed a model of the Lanai microgrid using Simulink®and Simscape Electrical™and conducted simulations to assess various configuration and control options.
“Simscape Electrical provides models of many of the components in our system, so there was little we had to build ourselves,” says Ben Schenkman, member of the technical staff at Sandia. “Bringing actual data into the Simulink environment was straightforward, which made the entire process of modeling, simulation, and verification very efficient.”