September 29, 2025, 2:00 PM HST
Hawaiian Electric has a historic clean energy milestone with its customer-sited rooftop solar and battery storage connected surpassing 1 gigawatt of generating capacity — the equivalent of about 100 million LED lightbulbs.
Rooftop solar in Waikōloa. (Photo courtesy: Pro Vision Solar Facebook)
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