Zachary Montondo was born in Cocoa, Florida, before
moving to the Big Island and later to Maui. They are
currently in pursuit of an Electrical Engineering degree.
Originally, a game developer spending their time learning
programming, music, 3D modeling, and animation, they
gained a fascination for engineering and robotics from the
joy of turning code into motion. This fascination causes
many of their hobbies to be engineering projects, such as a
self-driving RC car project, working on the CanSat project as
a system engineer, and continuing to design physics-based
games. Zach has consistently found immense joy in the
process of receiving an engineering problem and solving it,
and hopes to continually acquire a robust breadth of
knowledge to design solutions for large-scale practical
problems.
Home Island: Maui
High School:
Institution when accepted: UH Maui College
Site: Maui Electric Company (MECO). Kahului, Maui
Mentors: Alexandria Hovden & Caroline Somera
Project title: DC Load Calculator and Predictive Maintenance at HECO
Project Abstract:
At Maui Electric (MECO), substation reliability relies heavily on battery banks being the appropriate
size and condition. In the case of AC power outages, site–integral systems remain operable through
DC battery banks. To improve reliability, we catalogue all load-bearing MECO substation
components and create calculated estimates to benchmark our expected load output compared to
measured load outputs. This required us to develop software that streamlines data acquisition,
graphing, data entry, and discrepancy detection. This system, designed using manufacturer data,
such as maximum power burden, duty cycle, etc., will allow engineers to see the statistical spread of
each component’s weight on the DC battery banks’ load. By comparing real-world measured data
and our ideal calculated baseline using governing standards such as IEEE, our tool, integrated with
EXCEL and Python as its backbones, can provide engineers with a streamlined way to access
necessary data for component acquisition from battery manufacturers by assisting in generating
charts and spreadsheets specific to a given substation facility on Maui. Overall, this procedure will
improve reliability by ensuring that all substations have high-quality, up-to-date, and clear data to
make judgments on implementations, replacements, or repairs for critical substations’ backup
operational power banks.