Sacramento State’s 2 year-old Smart Grid project will have positive implications for the university and community, a university dean said Tuesday.

The project, will be an invaluable asset in efficiently using our region’s energy, said Dean of the College of Engineering and Computer Science Emir Jose Macari.

Macari spoke to an audience of approximately 100 people on Tuesday as a part of the Science Technology Engineering, and Mathematics public lecture series.

The three key concepts behind the national Smart Grid program are power electrical engineering, communications networking and cyber security, and renewal of energy. The main idea is to use the right kind of energy as safely and efficiently as possible. During his presentation, Macari said America relies too much on dangerous energy sources such as petroleum.

The Smart Grid project at Sac State focuses on product testing and researching methods to save and reuse energy.

The center has helped the community be more conscientious about its energy use by distributing about 100,000 smart meters, which are devices that precisely and instantaneously measure energy usage in a building, among homes in the Sacramento region.

“The Smart Grid will empower the user at the home to be able to really tell minute-by-minute how much energy use they’re consuming,” Macari said. “Through these home area networks they will be able to tell exactly what their usage is and be able to tell and decide whether they want to continue using the energy or save more money.”

The project has become a center-point in Sacramento, Marcari said.

“I knew we were going to do good things when we started this project,” Macari said. “There weren’t many students in the audience. Those people were mostly industry people in Sacramento that wanted to participate in the project. That’s what a state university should be doing. Not only graduating great kids and helping them get grade jobs but also helping the economy of our region.”

Macari said the Department of Energy provided a generous amount of funding toward Smart Grid, and the California Energy Commission has provided $2 million per year since 2008 to fund the project.

“When the California Energy Commission really started seeing the results we were producing,” Macari said, “and the quality of work that our students and faculty here were doing, they were amazed to see that we were doing better stuff than Berkeley and Stanford, and we started to receive big funding from them.”

Micah Stevenson can be reached at [email protected].