These are the meeting minutes of the July 2, 2019 Illinois Climate Action Plan Working Group.  Several SWATeam recommendations were assessed in this meeting.

Mohamed Attalla discussed clean energy goals, along with solar farm projects 1.0 and 2.0. sharing valuable information and insights.

Facilities and Services Customer Forum

As part of its ongoing customer service initiative, Facilities and Services will host a Customer Forum on Wednesday, May 1, from 8-11:30 a.m. at the I Hotel and Conference Center. The forum will address capital programs, sustainability and building service workers; the goal of this event is to fulfill our vision of being a responsive, reliable and highly valued service provider.

Malikah Gordon . Facilities & Services

Provost Andreas Cangellaris included this statement about the iCAP in the April 2019 letter (attached) to colleges and instructional units about the Space Inventory:

"I also want to take this opportunity to recap several campus initiatives regarding space stewardship. As you may be aware, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign established the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) in May 2010 and updated the document in 2015. The document outlines strategies, initiatives, and targets toward meeting the stated goal of carbon neutrality by 2050. The targets and strategies detailed in the plan represent a series of commitments the University is making in order to achieve its sustainability goals, including the Net Zero Space Growth Policy as found in the CAM. I encourage you to review our commitments as outlined in the climate action plan and the Net Zero Space Growth Policy"

Good Afternoon All,

This week’s meeting was productive and we were able to set up the excel spreadsheets needed to record data on the chiller plants, Abbott, and potable water. Over the past week I researched and created a checklist and table for conducting a water audit. The checklist will be shared here after some final corrections are made to it. I was able to determine what was needed and where stamped flow volumes are marked on each fixture. If there is no stamp on faucets there is a simple tool called a flow rate bag that will be purchased so auditors can determine the flow manually. As for urinals and lavatories the model and serial number will be recorded to search the model manually and figure out the flow rate. There is no hand tool to determine these flow rates.

The spreadsheets will be given to Mike Marquissee so his team can collect the data we need faster. Once the data is collected some analysis of it will be done to help us determine efficiencies and water consumption of the different facilities. Also it will help us figure out if we have line losses in our systems.

The next steps to be done this week is to get these excel spreadsheets to Mike and give him some time to gather all of the data we need. Analyze the raw data and compare the values to industry and national standards. This will allow us to figure out where we stand in our water consumption. Finish editing the water audit checklist and add snap shots of where the stamps can be located so it will be easier for auditors to know where to look. The water audit program we are creating right now will mainly be used for bathrooms and kitchens in university buildings. Research laboratories and student laboratories will be done by another team and program in the works.

Thank You,
Austin Jung

Good afternoon all,

This week’s meeting was short but was necessary to update Morgan on the progress made over the past three weeks and to determine the next steps to be taken. To catch everyone up I have attached all of my findings for information on the chilled water loops. A quick summary of what I discovered is that the vet med chiller plant is on a separate loop because of how far it is from other campus buildings. In its loop it has 5 different buildings it provides chilled water to. The other 6 chiller plants are all connected in the main chilled water loop. The loop consists of about 115 different campus buildings and they can be seen in the document. The buildings found in this loop were found by sorting the utilities billing information by chilled water vendor. The five chiller plants on the main loop also have the capability to isolate themselves from the main loop and provide certain buildings with chilled water. This list can also be found in the document.

I then read through the BIF’s plumbing materials list to see if it had any information on low flow fixtures. I found out that for some of the listed items like the lavatories in the description says “max flow 0.5 GPM in compliance with energy policy act of 1992 and ASME/ANSI standard A112.18.1M.” We do not know if it has all the listed fixtures and will have to continue looking into other building plumbing lists.

Besides researching I also created a rough water audit plan for campus buildings. This will be a very intensive process as most water audits need to test every water fixture to get the actual flow rates of them. The first part of the audit will be reviewing data on each building to see the history of water consumption. Next the billing and metered water will be compared to see if there is a loss of water. After the data collection and comparison is complete auditors will walk through the building to see if there are any visible leaks and test each water fixtures actual flow rate. The flow rate will be recorded and used to compare each building against each other to see which will but retro fitted first based on most water consumption.

For this upcoming week I will be researching and creating more questions to ask about the chiller plants and low flow water fixtures. We will try to plan meetings or phone calls with other knowledgeable people to see if they have information that can help our progress and clarify any questions we have. I will also be creating a checklist that can be given to interns or workers on how to perform the walk through part of the water audit and finding vendors that can sell us the tools needed to determine flow rates of different water fixture.

Thank You,
Austin Jung

iCAP Working Group Meeting Notes from March, 2019.