UH + Hawaiian Electric Innovation Impact Challenge
By Ian Brizdle | Feb. 13, 2020
I recently had the opportunity to participate as a Hawaiian Electric co-lead in the inaugural University of Hawaii + Hawaiian Electric Innovation Impact Challenge. The goal of this pilot initiative is to bring innovative new products to market through collaboration between the utility and the university.
I haven’t visited the UH College of Business Administration since I attended back in 2003, and the landscape has changed a bit. It is now referred to as the Shidler College of Business, thanks to a $25 million donation in 2006 from Jay H. Shidler, founder of The Shidler Group (In 2014 he increased the amount to $100 million). There is also a freshly-branded UH Ventures Accelerator program, powered by PACE (Pacific Asian Center for Entrepreneurship) which offers assistance to help university scholars and entrepreneurs bring their ideas to commercialization.
So how are we teaming up to champion innovation?
We began by drafting a short list of business challenges that we wanted the University of Hawaii to help us solve. Part of the value to the UH side in this project was our assistance in identifying real world needs so they can turn focus and apply their research into successful commercial business solutions. Colton Ching, Hawaiian Electric senior vice president of Planning & Technology and an executive sponsor for this project explained, “These challenges come from real needs that we have today. The proposed solutions are something that we are looking to use in our business to benefit our customers.”
The challenges ranged in topic from integrating more rooftop solar, electrification of transportation, and enhancing customer experience. For example, my topic area as a company co-lead was “Develop online solutions and associated learning opportunities that can help customers determine what utility programs best meet their needs.”
The challenges were presented formally to UH at a mixer event at the newly renovated UH PACE collaboration workshop area (another cool addition since my college years). The UH participants -faculty, grad students, and professors from primarily the engineering area — then formed teams around which challenges they wanted to tackle.
Over the course of a few months, the UH teams then worked together with their corresponding Hawaiian Electric employee leads to develop plans, milestones, and metrics for their projects. They finally presented to the larger group in January and a winner was selected.
And the winner is…
The winning proposal was titled “Nowcasting Solar Irradiance.” The proposed solution was to build a “nowcasting” model to predict solar irradiance on our islands 15 to 60 minutes into the future using newly available satellite data and state-of-the-art machine learning. This graphic display will help to alert our grid operators of impending changes in solar irradiance patterns that could affect the levels of solar energy flowing into our grid.
This winning team was awarded $10,000 provided by Hawaiian Electric and the UH Ventures program. The next step is for them to build a minimum viable product that we can evaluate and test for effectiveness. We will continue to work with that team and the UH Ventures program to develop this tool and hopefully see it on a screen in our System Operation control room someday.
Ian Brizdle is a manager of web and digital communications at Hawaiian Electric Company.
