iCAP Working Group Meeting Notes from March, 2019.

Good afternoon all,

This week’s meeting went well and we were able to discover more information on the low-flow water fixtures installed in some of the university buildings. I was also able to update the excel sheet, to the correct display for when we get data. At the beginning of the meeting, I was able to catch the group up on the information I read in the Master Utilities Plan and Combined Heat and Power (CHP) convention. The CHP convention had very general information on CHP generation and some specifics in areas we are not interested in. There was not much information on how water consumption is monitored or improving.

The Master Utilities Plan was very informative on how Abbot Power Plant and the Chiller plants work. It gave good background information and the condition they are in. It also provided suggestions on how to bring them back up to operational standards.

During the meeting, we called Mark Warner, and asked him for more information on the low-flow water fixture installations. We were not able to gain an active list of updated buildings, but were able to learn some other information. We learned that Guy Grant was in charge of the program, and we will contact him in the following weeks. We also found out there were some complaints about the low-flow fixtures which led to the removal of some of these fixtures. For example, some of the sinks are not providing enough hot water. Another contact we will be reaching is the Refrigeration Foreman to learn more about the chiller plants.

For the following meeting, I will continue my research on chiller plants and generate a list of questions about the projects to ask Kent Reifsteck, the Director of Utilities at F&S. I will also be using data on chilled water billing for each university building to figure out which buildings are in the chilled water loop. The low-flow water fixture project has been updated to involve which buildings have had them removed.

Thanks,

Austin Jung

Good afternoon all,

There was no week 4 update because of some time conflicts which lead to the cancelation of the meeting. This week proceeded normally and we recapped what happened for week 4 and continued progress forward on determining what data is needed for the chiller plants to determine their efficiencies and line losses. To keep everyone up to date last week I was able to email three different combined heat and power plants, they were in London, Helsinki, and Copenhagen. They either did not get back to me or told me to review what is on their site because no further information can be released. After reviewing all of their sites, I was still not able to find more information on water consumption of CHPs or how it is monitored. I also emailed Ashlynn Stillwell who is a professor here at UIUC and has done research on water consumption. She was able to give me some helpful sources to find industry standards on energy, fuel, and water consumption of all power plants.

In this week’s meeting we reviewed the excel spread sheet I created to determine what data would need to be collected for our analysis of the chiller plants. We came to the conclusion that the water makeup (potable water) for each chiller plant, total Water Chilled at each chiller plant, energy used at each chiller plant, and total chilled water metered from buildings in the loop. With this data the cooling and energy efficiencies can be determined along with the line losses.

For next week’s meeting we will be trying to figure out who to contact to determine which buildings have been retro fitted with the new low flow water fixtures and which have not yet. I will also be continuing my research on CHPs and reading into the master utilities plan. After reviewing the excel sheet I am going to make some edits to prepare it for when get our data. Thanks for keeping up and I will be back next week.

Best,

Austin Jung

The attached document contains the meeting minutes for 6 February 2019.

Good morning all,

Austin here and yesterday’s meeting with Morgan White and Sarthak Prasad went well. I reviewed articles on how power plants use freshwater and the ways to reduce their consumption. The biggest factor in water use at power plants is their cooling system. The metric for measuring this is gallon per KWh and it’s categorized by their withdrawal, consumption, and discharge. The different types of cooling systems have their own pros and cons. For example wet recirculating cooling is good because it doesn’t withdrawal a lot of water but it consumes more than the other methods. Then an example of an advanced cooling system is a hybrid system that used air and a cooling tower to combine the advantages of a cooling tower and the resourcefulness of using a dry system. The draw backs of using only air is it makes the thermal conversion efficiency go down and increases operational costs. More details can be found in the attached file.

We proceeded to continue research on how our power plant and chiller plants operate by looking at the water and energy consumption of the billing logs. We plan on meeting with Mike next week to gain more insight on the chiller plants and their water consumption. Then we looked at the piping layouts for the Universities potable and cooling water pipelines.

To further our research I will finish reviewing some more articles on cooling tower water consumption. Then find articles with more detail on how cogeneration plants work and what metrics are used to measure their energy and water consumption. There should be more data on this from different European studies because they have similar systems like ours at Abbott. Lastly I will familiarize myself with our systems by researching the chiller plants and Abbott information given on the Facility & Services webpage.

Thanks,
Austin Jung

$230,000 of funding from the Carbon Credit Sales Fund was approved for Energy Piles at Hydro-Systems Lab by Evan DeLucia and Mohamed Attalla

Purpose of Project:

"This project will install 8 energy piles in the foundation of the Hydro-Systems Lab on campus, and provide new research capabilities and a geothermal exchange system for reduction of energy demand from that building." -Morgan White (2/6/19)

An email of the approval is linked below.

The mode share survey email went out this afternoon.