Sharon Irish attended the NY-GEO Webinar: Public and Private Thermal Utilities - Where It's Working & Why and found out that there's a geothermal loop at Thomas Paine School in Urbana.

The webinar flyer is attached. 

"The three winners of the 2021 Sustainability Competition for Undergraduates were announced on Saturday afternoon.

The overall winners in this inaugural competition were Jamie Lee and Semi Shin who developed a communication strategy for promoting the use of sustainable cement. They won $2000 for their innovative efforts. Their faculty advisor was Prof. Iwona Jasiuk.

The runner-up award ($1000) went to three MechSE students, Advay Sudarshan, Aryan Panigrahi, and Yuge Ji. They proposed the development of an energy efficient thermoelectric cooling system for data centers. MechSE’s Associate Departmental Head, Prof. Sanjiv Sinha, advised them.

Third prize ($500) went to Sakshi Vaya, who proposed a gender education strategy in India.

The six winning entries may be viewed on the competition website.

Thank you again for the wonderful support of the 54 specialist advisors and initial judges, and of the seven final judges. I also immensely appreciate the tireless support of the fellow coordinating team members, Prof. (emeritus) Robert McKim, Prof. Warren Lavey, Prof. Michelle Wander, Peter Davis (Univ. of St. Thomas), and Shreyas Venkatarathinam (MechSE Senior).

We trust that you might again be able to support us with the Fall 2022 competition, which will feature a few structural changes. Also, our students will get the chance to collaborate with those from other universities, locally and internationally, as they address their chosen sustainability challenges."

-Leon Liebenberg (12/04/2021)

Stacy Gloss, Meredith Moore, Morgan White, and Scott Tess met to discuss Resilience Team work. 

We discussed:

• NGICP presentation scheduled for December 10 with presentations by Heidi Leuzler and Eliana Brown
• NGICP SSC Step II Application to be submitted 11/19/21
• Carbon Offset Program development. Discussed that "local" for this objective means within boundaries of Champaign County.  Next questions to answer are: Why, What, How for developing a local carbon offset program.

According to F&S, Management Engineer, Mike Halm:

1. Currently, this unit is in occupied mode on weekdays, 6AM to midnight.  Normally the occupancy schedule will more closely follow the hours the building is open, but runtimes were extended across campus as a precaution during the pandemic.

2. When the building was originally designed, there likely wasn’t a set amount of air changes per hour applied to every classroom.  Typically for classrooms the heating and cooling airflows are determined based on the specific loads in each room, rather than applying a flat rate based on the volume of the room.  If it would help, we could share the original ventilation drawings from 1989.  Regarding the ASHRAE standards, any new construction or renovation work on campus should have mechanical ventilation provided in accordance with ASHRAE 62.1.  However, there were different codes and standards in place when this building was constructed 30 years ago.  The current version of ASHRAE 62.1 may have slightly different requirements than the codes in place when the building was built.

Attached are the notes from the November meeting for the Campus Tree Advisory Committee. 

In Fall 2021, the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) announced that it has successfully acquired or facilitated $34.7 million in external grants from various agencies during the past several months. Some highlights:

• The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced funding for a new project led by iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna to optimize design for “agrivoltaic” systems — fields with both crops and solar panels — that will maintain crop production, produce renewable energy, and increase farm profitability.

This $10 million, four-year project, funded through the USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Sustainable Agriculture Systems program with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign as the lead institution, will study agrivoltaics in a variety of land types and climate scenarios in Illinois, Colorado, and Arizona. The goal is to maintain or increase crop yield, improve the combined energy and food productivity of the land, and diversify and increase farmers’ profits with row crops, forage, and specialty crops across a range of environments

• iSEE has helped facilitate funding to enable geospatial data-driven scientific discovery at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the resulting research will lead to better understanding of the risks and impacts of climate change and disasters

The $15 million Institute for Geospatial Understanding through an Integrative Discovery Environment (I-GUIDE) will receive the funding over five years as part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Harnessing the Data Revolution, which establishes five institutes across the United States to explore questions at the frontiers of science and engineering. Shaowen Wang, Professor and Head of Geography and Geographic Information Science and Founding Director of the CyberGIS Center for Advanced Digital and Spatial Studies, will lead the institute. Collaborating scientists and institutions will work with the CyberGIS Center in partnership with iSEE and the U of I’s Discovery Partners Institute.

• $2.1M in additional five-year funding from the Leverhulme Centre for Climate Change Mitigation for U of I researchers, led by Evan DeLucia (Emeritus Professor of Plant Biology), Carl Bernacchi (U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service), and new co-PI Lisa Ainsworth (USDA ARS) to extend the campus’s enhanced weathering experiments using basalt rock on farm fields.
• $2M+ from NSF’s Smart & Connected Communities program for a team led by Crop Sciences Assistant Professor Andrew Margenot to build a “Nutrient Management Community (NuMC)” to help farmers adopt effective and trusted tools that will help address critical water quality issues.
• A $1.7M USDA NIFA subaward for Margenot and Crop Sciences Professor Emily Heaton to help identify ways to diversify the corn belt ecosystem and increase rural prosperity.
• A $1M, two-year grant from the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to bolster an iSEE 2020 seed-funded project to turn ash into energy. The Rapid AI-based Dissection of Ashes using Raman and XRF Spectroscopy (RADAR-X) Project is led by Civil & Environmental Engineering Assistant Professor Nishant Garg.
• Several other awards of $1M or less.

See the attached file for the iQ Fall 2021 to read this article in its original form.