"Why doesn't the company installing the solar panels at U of I put them over the parking lot? I would provide shade for the cars underneath and would eliminate having to kill whatever would be underneath them in the fields."

The best option for building solar panels is ground-mounted, said Morgan White, the associate director for sustainability at the University of Illinois.

"As part of our Climate Leadership Commitments the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has a goal of producing at least 25,000 megawatt-hours (MWh) per year from on-campus solar," she said. "When we evaluated options for meeting this goal, rooftop solar, solar over parking areas, and ground-mounted solar were all considered. The most cost-effective option is ground-mounted solar, and it also allows for larger-scale installations.

"For a sense of the scale, the two solar farms will be a total of 75 acres, while the largest parking lot on campus is less than 15 acres.

"When installing solar panels over parking areas, there are additional infrastructure and labor costs to raise the solar panels above the ground level. Although we do not currently have any solar over parking areas, Facilities & Services is working with the Parking Department to evaluate potential locations for a pilot installation. We are also continuing to install rooftop solar on individual buildings."

Solar panels are on the following five Urbana campus buildings:

— Business Instructional Facility

— the Activities & Recreation Center

— Wassaja Residence Hall

— University High School Gymnasium

— Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) Building.

"I'd also like to emphasize that the ground-mounted solar panels do not harm the plants under them. After building the first Solar Farm, we learned that there was an excellent opportunity for growing useful plants under and around the panels," said White. "This is a great opportunity for creating a multi-functional ecosystem, with pollinator supportive plants and protected areas for small animals and insects."

https://www.news-gazette.com/toms-mailbag/toms-mailbag-june-26-2020/article_65ef2976-09b9-526a-848d-1419c905b0ec.html

Good afternoon,

My name is Meredith Moore and I am the Sustainability Programs Coordinator at the Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) on campus. We are very excited to share the first draft of the Illinois Climate Action Plan (iCAP) 2020! The iCAP is our University’s comprehensive strategic plan for achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. This attached document consists of eight key themes (Energy, Transportation, Land & Water, Zero Waste, Education, Engagement, Resilience, and Implementation/Funding), each of which contain actionable objectives to guide our sustainability plans for the next five years and beyond. It includes content and graphs without the design and images which will be incorporated later this summer. We would appreciate your feedback on the iCAP content at this form and invite you to share this information and link with any students, faculty, staff, or community members. We are interested to hear what you like about this document, suggestions for improvement, and any additional comments you would like to share with us.

Your review and feedback of the iCAP is a critical step in the drafting process! We have hosted in-person and virtual public forums to achieve this, and we are now accepting feedback on the draft itself. You can also find the PDF iCAP draft, as well as our feedback form, on our website here, or by using go.illinois.edu/iCAP2020. Please submit all feedback by Friday, June 26. You do not need to read the entire document to provide feedback; if you have a particular interest area, feel free to comment specifically on that topic. Thank you for your time and effort, and we look forward to reviewing your feedback! Please reach out to me if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Meredith

--
Meredith Moore
Sustainability Programs Coordinator

Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE)

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

1101 W. Peabody, Urbana, Suite 338 (NSRC)

217.333.0119 | mkm0078@illinois.edu

sustainability.illinois.edu

Please consider the environment before printing out an email.

RailSplitter Wind Farm provided the May 2020 Buyer's Share amounts by hour, totaling 1892.7 Megawatt hours. See attached file.

The main purpose to transition to iBuy is it will promote a sustainable process (e.g. no more paper, toner, postage, delivery, etc). Purchase Orders (PO) through Banner have historically been printed and mailed to vendors. For scope, here are Banner PO number over the last four fiscal years FY17 = 7,804, FY18 = 7,368, FY19 = 7,537, and FY20 = 5,669 (2 months remain in the fiscal year). In a conservative estimation, say each PO is 10 pages. This alone would have been 75,370 sheets of paper. This doesn’t consider the toner, postage or delivery emissions. In comparison, iBuy POs FY17 = 2,785, FY18 = 2,618, FY19 = 2,843, and FY20 = 3,179. Years FY17-FY19 were a 74% to 26% ratio. The efforts purchasing has made this year has shown positive movement towards higher utilization of this system as the current ratio for FY20 is 64% to 36%. Putting an exact percentage is difficult because we’re dependent on the systems abilities and the modifications Jaggaer can implement for us. Historically we have been limited in our abilities to work towards a transition to iBuy because of software limitations. 

We are currently in the process of updating functionality which will enable higher system utilization. Here are some of the updates currently being worked on: 

·       Addition of Contracts Plus. Historically, purchase orders which were tied to a contract or solicitation had to be submitted through Banner. The addition of Contracts Plus will eventually replace iCS and everything will be housed in the same system which would eliminate this limitation.

·       We’ve also been limited on a method that clearly allows us to process a Standing PO in iBuy. It is technically possible; however, the process is convoluted. We anticipate having the ability to process standing POs by FY21. In FY19, we processed over 3,000 standing POs in Banner. Not all of these will transition to iBuy immediately, but we could potentially see a large reduction here in FY21.

·       We’re also in the process of implementing the America To Go  punchout catalog in iBuy which will reduce the amount of restaurant and catering order that will come through Banner. For scope, UIUC spends about $12 million dollars in this market.

Attached are the meeting minutes from the iWG meeting on 4/27/20. The focus of this meeting was to discuss the SWATeam recommendations that were submitted to the iWG by April 3, 2020.