Hawaiian Electric Co. and the U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday they will invest a combined $4.8 million in a research project to look into how to increase rooftop solar and energy storage on Hawaii’s grid.

Over the next three years, HECO said it will work with about 20 commercial and industrial customers to test the project. The research team will test on-site photovoltaic and energy storage in areas with a high concentration of such renewable technologies.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s SunShot Initiative awarded HECO $2.4 million as a part of its Sustainable and Holistic Integration of Energy Storage and Solar PV program (SHINES). The award is one of six nationally for a total of $18.3 million in clean-energy research awards.

HECO said it will match the $2.4 million as it it looks for technologies to handle high levels of renewables on the grid.

“This is one challenge in reaching our goal of more customer choices and lower customer costs on a 100 percent renewable-energy system,” said Shelee Kimura, HECO vice president for corporate planning and business development.

The project is called “Integrating System to Edge-of-Network Architecture and Management for SHINES Technologies on High Penetration Grids.” Its goal is to rethink how grids with high penetrations of distributed generation are cost-effectively planned and operated. The project will deploy SHINES technology to show the system-level benefits of giving utility operators the ability to “see” and control a distribution system, such as power generated by rooftop solar panels on customers’ sites.

“The distribution grid today is trying to cope with rapid increases in bidirectional flow of distributed generation resources,” said Dora Nakafuji, director of HECO’s renewable energy planning division. “We need to develop reliable and cost-effective PV and storage technologies offering customers more plug-and-play options to integrate with the grid and participate in our clean-energy future.”