Hi Pete and Shawn--

There was no zero-waste activity this past week.

Best regards,

Marya Ryan

Second Nature paid UIUC for the sale of vintage 2017 carbon credits to Bonneville Environmental Foundation (BEF) as part of UIUC's participation in the Carbon Credit and Purchasing Program.

Second Nature transferred 2,865 vintage Carbon Credits (VCUs) to BP Target Neutral (BPTN) on behalf of UIUC.

For this sale, UIUC receives $6.25 per credit. The total amount paid to UIUC for this sale is $17,906.25

An email of confirmation of this payment is attached below.

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

Hi Pete and Shawn—

I don’t have any zero-waste activities to report from this past week.

Best regards,

Marya Ryan

Hi Pete and Shawn—

Zero waste activity for the past week was an exchange of emails with Fab Lab to see if they could make use of the EPS densifier. They appreciated the offer but declined it for lack of space. They suggested Arch Annex1 may have use for it, and Morgan has also given me other suggestions, which I plan to pursue this week.

Best regards

Marya Ryan

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

Good morning,

Week 3’s meeting was a very informative and productive with the help of Mike, who is the director of budgeting and resource planning for the energy services division. Mike was able to help confirm and teach us about what is exactly happening at the chiller plants. He caught us up to date on what is being metered and where to find certain information. Together we brainstormed ideas on how we can determine a metric to measure the water consumption of each chiller plant. This included the metered water going into the cooling tower, water going into the chiller loop, and comparing that number to the total chilled water produced. Alongside this comparison the BTUs will also be monitored to see how much energy is being used to produce all of this.

There are a couple of tasks that I will be getting done for week 4’s meeting. These include and not limited to:

• Creating a list of resources needed to be collected to determine the efficiency of the chiller plants and how much water/energy they consume
• Email other combine heat and power and chiller plants to see how they track or measure their water consumption
• Email Ashlynn Stillwill to see if she knows any good places to look for national and industry averages and standards
• Look into BIF’s grey water meter to determine how much water could be saved if grey water system was enabled

This week was successful and looking forward to the information that will be collected in the following weeks. The attached document is some notes on UIUC cooling towers, Abbott, chiller plants, CHP plants, and our meeting.

Thank you,
Austin Jung

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