Customer-sited rooftop solar and energy storage on Hawaiian Electric grids reaches historic milestone

In fiction or the real world, 1 gigawatt is a heck of a lot of power

REAL WORLD: 68.2% of electricity generation remains 'non-renewable' in the 3 Hawaiian Electric Counties per Annual Report - Hawai‘i State Energy Office (p26)

News Release from HECO, Sept 26 2025

HONOLULU, Sept. 26, 2025 – Hawaiian Electric has reached a historic clean energy milestone with the amount of customer-sited rooftop solar and battery storage connected to its grids surpassing 1 gigawatt of generating capacity -- the equivalent of about 100 million LED lightbulbs.

The achievement comes roughly 25 years after Hawaiian Electric launched its first solar programs for customers and began its journey to becoming a national leader in addressing the technical challenges of integrating high levels of intermittent solar energy into its grids. The company’s efforts have helped produce one of the highest rates of rooftop solar adoption in the nation, with an estimated 44% of the single-family homes served by Hawaiian Electric boasting solar systems.

Helped by steady customer demand, the rated capacity of rooftop solar systems and battery storage has more than doubled over the past 10 years.

“This is a major accomplishment both in terms of providing our customers the ability to adopt clean energy technologies and helping reduce Hawaii’s dependence on imported oil,” said Kaiulani Shinsato, Hawaiian Electric Customer Energy Resources co-director. “It’s also a testament to the hard work of the staff at Hawaiian Electric to develop customer-friendly renewable energy programs over the years, working closely with the solar industry and other stakeholders under the oversight of the Public Utilities Commission.”

Moviegoers may be most familiar with the term “gigawatt” from the “Back to the Future” franchise, in which 1.21 gigawatts of power sent a DeLorean traveling through time. In reality, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, 1 gigawatt is equivalent to:

• 100 million LED light bulbs
• 1,887,000 solar panels
• 294 wind turbines
• 2,627 Tesla Model 3s or
• 0.5 Hoover Dams

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REALITY:

2018: Years of Hype: Hawaii Electricity Still 82.4% Oil

2021: Hawaii Is Replacing Its Last Coal Plant With a ‘Giant Battery’—Powered by Oil