Hawaiian Electric Co. and the Sacramento Municipal Utility District have won a $2.97 million grant to study ways how increasing levels of photovoltaic power can be accommodated on electric grids.

The award from the California Solar Initiative Research, Development, Deployment and Demonstration

Program is to be matched by $1.29 million in support from the utilities their research partners. They are to demonstrate and test new hardware and software tools for communicating and management of photovoltaic systems.

HECO said its partnership with the Sacramento utility was timely because both are seeing increasing levels of photovoltaic installations and need new tools to predict and monitor high levels of power being generating by the systems while maintaining reliability.