11/17/2021

Present: Morgan White, Meredith More, Eric Green, Tony Mancuso, Stacy Gloss

Gloss provided an overview of the local carbon offset objective as described in the iCAP. There was discussion that there are two sides to the issue. 1. The funding mechanism. 2. What projects are funded by off-setting faculty & staff travel impacts?

The team was asked to review the carbon offset programs by the University of California System and Duke University as two different models. The first is a campus-system internal model where funds are used to develop projects on campuses throughout the system. A university-system advisory board receives applications for projects and approves the projects that meet program requirements.  The Duke carbon offset initiative involves a portfolio of offsets including a methane capture waste-to-energy at an industrial farm,  urban tree planting program, avoided conversion, wetland restoration, and a pilot program for residential energy efficiency piloted in 2012 --- these programs happen off-campus.

We agreed that there is an economies-of-scale issue with local off-sets to overcome. For local-community-based projects, the cost per off-set is going to be higher than aggregating funds into one industrial scale project or program. An carbon-off-set company, for example, might contact a city and offer $1.00 per tree for off-sets, but it costs over $400 to install and maintain a tree.  (A program like this appears to generate a very small added value to the paid organization.)

U of I campus renewable energy & energy efficiency projects can be tracked by the campus energy office. For community off-sets, an agency (university or otherwise) would need to set up a mechanism to collect and distribute funds for community-based projects, perhaps through a non-for-profit interface. Projects can include urban tree-planting, renewable energy, energy efficiency, prairie restoration etc. 3rd party verification is needed.

As a next step, this team and others must define "local" in "local offset program" in order to meet this objective in the iCAP. Is the program going to be internal to campus, or include the local community as recipients of funds community projects?

This team must also interpret what the iCAP is saying to off-set. 

• Annual business air-travel by faculty & staff? 
• Vehicle miles driven by faculty & staff on University business?
• All electricity & heat generated by carbon sources for the University of Illinois?

These questions are fundamental to designing and implementing a local-carbon-offset program.  

The following message was sent to Morgan White to share with Carbon Credit Fund Administrators by Thurman Etchison, the Assistant Director of Dining - Facilities and Equipment, on November 18, 2021. The email & attachments contain important information regarding the potential installation of a Grind2Energy system at LAR:

Carbon Credit Fund Administrators,

Housing Dining Services is seeking funds to add a Grind 2 Energy system to our Lincoln Avenue Dining Hall. Grind 2 Energy is a system that allows us to put our food waste into a pumpable slurry so that it may be taken to an anerobic digester at the Urbana-Champaign Sanitary District. These systems replace the aerobic digesters we previously had in our dining units. The aerobic digesters had issues with the effluent not meeting EPA standards.

This system would be our fifth and likely final system as we would have one at every residential dining location. These are operational at Ikenberry, PAR, FAR and ISR. Currently, University Housing does not have resources to fund this project due to the impact of COVID on our budget. We would reach out to the Student Sustainability Committee for funding but for us to do the infrastructure work and have the unit installed prior to the next school year, we need to start before the next round of submissions.

The use of Grind 2 Energy has been a very successful program for us. It meets our needs, keeps us in compliance with regulatory bodies, is comparable in costs to other methods of disposal. It is very sustainable in terms of the environment. To date, we have diverted 289 tons of food waste even though there was limited use until this school year.

The amount we are requesting is $133,538.00. A simple breakdown of our expected costs is below. As our tradespeople have installed the 4 previous units, we believe this number to be very accurate. Our last unit came in within $1000 of our estimate.

LAR Grind 2 Energy – Preliminary Budget Cost

• LAR Grind 2 Energy System (equipment and labor)…..................................................................... $86,000
  • (Rigging fees)........................................................................................................................... $4,650
• Concrete Slab Work (existing planter modifications site work & new concrete slab)….................... $23,100
• New Wall at Table (Demolition, floor work, ceiling work, MEP & new wall)…................................... $19,788
• TOTAL:                                                                                                                                              $133,538

I would like to add that these units are highly visible on campus and it is our intention to start highlighting the metrics in our dining units via electronic messaging. This may include digital displays, The Housing Insider and social media platforms. There is also great deal of interest in biogas impact from these units. I have met with 2 groups of students from the CEE 190 class about these units in the past month.

In short, this program reduces carbon emissions, produces fertilizer and creates energy. The systems are highly reliable and have had almost no issues to date. Please see the attachments for additional info.

Thank you for your consideration, 

THURMAN ETCHISON

Assistant Director of Dining - Facilities and Equipment

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.

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.

Over the summer and fall, iSEE has certified...

• Two new green offices:
  • The Oak Street Library Facility Conservation Unit
  • iSEE
• One new green chapter:
  • Zeta Psi
• 17 green events:
  • ​​​​​​​Including Illini Lights Out.

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