Sol Systems is looking to present at the AASHE’s Global Conference on Sustainability in Higher Education (GCSHE) sometime from October 12-14 through their request for abstracts on Emerging Issues in the field.

Sol Systems is looking to present on our work expanding the impact of renewable energy projects that would certainly focus on things we did for the U of I project, namely the inclusion of pollinator habitats, zero waste construction and the work with students for their Sustainability Minor Capstone projects.

All, This update is a day late as I was out of the office on Monday.
Last week I was out on Thursday and Friday as well. Student staff covered Bike Center hours in my absence. On Monday last week we received a bike from Housing which we were able to quickly fix up and put out for sale.  
This week we have a couple drop off repairs to catch up on, a few more bikes to fix up for sale, and some donations to process.

The numbers:

Visitors: 26
Sales: $1,167

Memberships: 6 for $180
Bikes (refurb): 3 for $500
U-locks: 5 for $105

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Campus Bike Center Coordinator

All, Busy week! Sold bikes, stripped bikes, helped people fix bikes. We had especially good volunteer turnout on Friday. One frequent visitor even donated his neighbor’s old bike that was headed for the dumpster before he intercepted. Another person said they’ll be here to volunteer on Monday.

Donations, thankfully, have hit a little bit of a lull, so we’ll be able to spend this week catching up on that. On Friday alone—see aforementioned volunteer levels—we started 4 new shop builds that will be finished this week.

We also sold a bike to someone from Housing who works specifically in promoting healthy and environmental lifestyles in the dorms. He seemed really jazzed about our programming and operations. Hopefully that’ll be a future partnership.

The numbers:

Visitors: 28
Sales: $1,307.10
Memberships: 2 for $60
Bikes (refurb): 6 for $1,040
Tires/tubes: 5 for $26
U locks: 3 for $63

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Campus Bike Center Coordinator

All, Slow-ish week on the whole. Some rainy weather kept it quiet for a day or two. We’re holding steady with 20 – 25 bikes for sale as we’ve been able to keep up with the pace of sales. We got two donations late on Friday, one of which had nearly nothing wrong with it, and thusly was fixed up and on the sales floor within an hour.

We had a few visitors express interest in employment at the Bike Center so I will follow up with them this week to help bolster our roster.

Sarthak came by on Friday and explained a great time-saver for doing on-the-spot 529 bike registrations. This will be a great help in about a month when we’re deluged with incoming students.

The numbers:

Visitors: 20
Sales: $450.50
Bikes (refurb): 2 for $280
Tires/tubes: 5 for $21

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Campus Bike Center Coordinator

All, Steadily picking up around here. Had to pull out the folding stands on a couple occasions. Got a new hire in the works. Dates are set for Light The Night and Bike To Work Day for the fall. On Friday we had a volunteer working towards a membership, which was a welcome occurrence.

This week is business as usual.

The numbers:

Visitors: 20
Sales: $1022.10
Bikes (refurb): 3 for $500
Memberships: 5 for $150
Misc: $58.50

Thanks!

Jacob Benjamin
Manager, Campus Bike Center

The News-Gazette printed this story about the geothermal at the Campus Instructional Facility: https://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/university-illinois/renewable-en...

"URBANA — The University of Illinois’ glossy new building at Springfield Avenue and Wright Street represents the next step in its sustainability goals.

The four-story, 122,000- square-foot, $75 million Campus Instructional Facility is also the biggest geothermal installation on the UI campus.

Its geothermal system can pump 135 tons of hot or cool air into the building. That’s twice as much as the next biggest geothermal system on campus, and about 30 times the amount pumped into an average home.

“The whole world knows about solar and wind power and things like that — hydroelectric power, too — but that’s only the electric side of energy. Energy also includes heating and cooling,” said Morgan White, director of sustainability at UI Facilities & Services. “It’s truly transformative, because it’s moving into the phase of getting us clean thermal energy and not just clean electricity.”

Electricity provides heating and cooling as well, she said, but it’s primarily provided by natural gas, propane and other nonrenewable sources of energy.

The key to the geothermal endeavor? Forty boreholes dug into the Bardeen Quad next to Grainger Library. They’re 20 feet apart, 6 inches wide and drilled 450 feet deep.

Initially, the project required 60 boreholes, but UI researchers reduced that figure — and made the system financially feasible — by checking the thermal conductivity of different rock and soil layers, or the rate that heat passes through them, while considering the depth and flow rate of groundwater.

To keep the building temperate year-round, a mixture of water and glycol circulates from a heat pump in the mechanical room into a pipe that runs up and down the underground field of boreholes.

In winter, the pump pulls heat from the ground into the building. In summer, heat is pumped from the building back into the ground.

“It’s like when you have a bathtub that’s a little too hot or a little too cold, and you pour some water in and stir it up,” White said.

In all, the system reduces the building’s energy consumption by 65 percent compared to a typical heating/cooling installation, saving about $45,000 per year.

Student initiatives helped fund the state-of-the-art thermal system. The 18-member Student Sustainability Committee, funded by the annual “Green Fee” assessed on students, allocated $375,000 — or about 13 percent of the system’s cost — to the facility’s geothermal installation.

The building has a number of other unique features. It contains two dozen new classrooms — one of the highest figures on campus — replete with active-learning and distance-learning spaces. In the fall, engineering courses will occupy most of the space, along with math, statistics and other technical classes.

The facility is also the first UI building funded through a public-private partnership, which allows for tax-exempt financing.

Meanwhile, faculty and graduate students will use temperature information from a 385-foot-deep monitoring well, funded by Facilities & Services and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment, for continued research opportunities. 

As part of the Illinois Climate Action Plan, the university plans to get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Currently, around 12 percent of electricity is provided by renewable sources, like the solar and wind farms near campus, White said. But only 4.5 percent of the UI’s total energy use, counting thermal, comes from renewable sources.

“Clean electricity is important, but it’s not enough,” White said.

In the planning stages, the UI wasn’t supposed to start implementing geothermal systems until 2035, but a suggestion by Yu-Feng Forrest Lin of the Prairie Research Institute jump-started that process."