Hawaiian Electric Co. said Friday it has added the first utility-scale energy storage system to Oahu’s electric grid as it works to make space for more renewables.

Housed in a shipping container at Campbell Industrial Park, the $1.6 million system from Wyoming- based Altairnano has the capacity to provide 1 megawatt of power.

HECO said Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, a renewable energy and environmental technology research and development unit at the University of Hawaii, paid for the battery. The energy storage system will be studied over a 2-year demonstration period.

The purpose is to test the system’s safety and its capability to help connect more renewable energy to the grid.

“To achieve our 100 percent renewable energy goal, we need to be able to smooth power flowing to the grid from variable renewable generation like wind and solar as well as shift electricity generated when the sun is shining to when people use the most electricity in the evening,” HECO’s vice president for corporate planning and business development, Shelee Kimura, said.

Matthias Fripp, assistant professor at UH-Manoa’s Department of Electrical Engineering, said the experiment will help the the electric utility better understand the types of technology it will need to achieve the state’s goal of using 100 percent clean energy by 2045.

“It’s going to be a useful test bed for the kind of advanced balancing and control that we’ll need in a high-renewable power grid,” he said.

HECO said the battery can go from zero to full power output in a fraction of a second, providing up to 250 kilowatts of power for one hour or 1 megawatt for 15 minutes. During the demonstration, HECO will test controls that may be used in larger batteries for power smoothing, voltage regulation and frequency response.

HECO is working with the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute on a similar project on Hawaii island for wind smoothing and frequency regulation. Another project at Maui Electric Co.’s Palaau Power Plant on Molokai is being tested to provide energy and stability to that island’s grid should a generator go offline.

“Battery storage systems can provide many different services to both customers and the utility, however, the systems need to be told what to do and how to do it to provide the most value while maximizing the life span of the system,” said Richard Rocheleau, director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, in a statement. “These projects will test different control strategies on different islands for different power system issues and provide information to Hawaii and the industry on the trade-offs between performance and longevity.”