In order to reach the iCAP objective of 25,000 MWh/year of solar energy by FY25, additional panels will need to be installed. Large scale, ground mounted panels appear to be the least expensive route towards achieving the FY25 objective.
RailSplitter Wind Farm provided the February 2020 Buyer's Share amounts by hour, totaling 2,239.6 Megawatt hours. See attached file.
Dear Stacey, Morgan, and Prasad,
The CEE research team (including Shelly, Weichen, Ruifeng, and I) has held two weekly meetings and discussed our ongoing project. Below is a summary of the ongoing efforts:
As for the next step, we wonder if there is a good time to schedule a quick interview with you, and/or the stakeholders you mentioned last time? The purpose is to understand the design options and restrictions (i.e., types of barriers, guideways, and/or booth-location choices).
Thank you.
Yanfeng
iSEE is pleased to announce that eight instructors have been named 2020-21 Levenick iSEE Teaching Sustainability Fellows.
Funded by a generous endowment from Illinois Alumnus Stuart L. Levenick and his wife Nancy J. Levenick, this second cohort of faculty and teachers from across the University of Illinois campus (and one from University Laboratory High School) will incorporate sustainability into existing classes or create entirely new courses built around sustainability elements.
Associate Director for Education & Outreach Gillen D’Arcy Wood said applications nearly doubled for the Levenick iSEE Teaching Sustainability program this year, a positive sign of a growing program — and growing interest in adding sustainability thinking in all academic units.
The 2020-21 cohort and the courses they will undertake:
Read more about the Fellows and their projects >>>
The Levenick iSEE Teaching Sustainability Fellowship program consists of four elements to help the 2020-21 Fellows best incorporate sustainability into their courses:
Help turn off thousands of lights to reduce energy consumption on campus. Sign up to participate in iSEE's Illini Lights Out (ILO) and demonstrate your commitment to fighting climate change and saving our planet!
5:30-7 p.m. | Friday, March 6 | Foreign Language Building Lobby
All, Happy March! Looks like it’s coming in like a lamb for a change.
Still slow around here as far as visitors are concerned. On Friday of last week we got 7 bikes donated, all of which will be junked or passed along to Salt & Light (3 kids’ bikes). That’ll give the student staff something easy to do this week. Elsewhere: Our grinder wheel bit the dust so we’ll be all analog on filing housing and cleaning parts until that is replaced. Less electricity use = more sustainable!
This week I’ve got an interview for a student worker, our Fix-a-Flat class on Thursday and on I’ll be setting up some of my staff to have key-access when I’m away.
The numbers:
Visitors: 45
Sales: $132
Membership: 1 for $30
Tires/tubes: 4 for $49
Thanks!
Jacob Benjamin
Manager, Campus Bike Center
Hello 2020 researchers!
After winning 1st place internationally in 2018 and 2019, lab researchers who use cold-storage at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign are encouraged to register in the 2020 International Laboratory Freezer Challenge to save energy and help the campus win for a third-straight year.
Sign up HERE!
Campus efforts in more than 70 laboratories across 15 buildings earned Illinois the award last year. The total energy usage in these spaces decreased by an estimated 438 kWh/day or a combined annual total equivalent of 13.5 homes energy for one year.
Worldwide recognition
The University of Illinois research community has received international recognition from a number of organizations and media publications:
Lab Manager Magazine, Cold Storage March 2019 Published article with participants quoted for expert advice here
Nature Magazine feature published in Oct. 2018 and Sept. 2019 edition
S-Labs highlights our achievements in their short-listed profiles here
iSEE and Facilities & Services published news releases U of I Wins Freezer Challenge
Labs that use ultra-ultra low temperature freezers (-150C), ultra-low temperature freezers (-80C), lab freezers (-40C to -20C), refrigerators, or cold rooms can earn points by taking action now.
For more details on how your lab can save cooling energy, visit freezerchallenge.org.
The Freezer Challenge takes place between December 2019 and May 2020. Individual labs self-report and estimate their energy saving on score sheets. These sheets are made available via email upon registration and are due by May 1, 2020.
Reductions were achieved due to the dedication and creativity of researchers across campus in implementing best practices for cold storage management. They received points for taking actions such as properly maintaining freezers and refrigerators, discarding old samples, and retiring unneeded units.
Campus-specific highlights from the 2018 competition and 2019 competition are available on the Illinois Freezer Challenge website.
In 2019, over 400 labs representing 41 organizations around the world competed, and Illinois was named one of three organizational winners by saving 160,000 kWh/year. The Ming Lab in the Department of Plant Biology, managed by Julie Nguyen, was named an honorable mention winner in the individual lab category.
The International Institute for Sustainable Laboratories (I2SL) and My Green Labs run the Freezer Challenge. Participants have already saved over 8.5 million kWh since 2017, approximately enough to offset the carbon emissions associated with driving over 15 million miles.
Past winners were announced at the I2SL conference and their accomplishments published in Nature.
For more information on the Illinois campus achievements and competition, check out our Illinois-specific website: https://freezerchallengeui.wixsite.com/freezerchallenge
Join us and submit your scoresheet by midnight on May 1st to achieve world-class results!
For help getting started contact:
Madeline Barone @ mbarone2@illinois.edu
Madeline E. Barone, B.S.
Environmental Sustainability and Psychology
Energy Efficiency & Conservation Specialist | UIUC Facilities & Services
Co-Director | Eco-Olympics
https://www.linkedin.com/in/madelinebarone/
Good morning Morgan,
I have gathered the numbers that correspond to an acre of solar cover.
The estimate is that an acre of solar canopy could generate 760,536 kWh annually (this estimate takes into account the weather patterns of our location and possible shading/system inefficiencies).
I remember you saying that right now the University pays $0.05 per kWh. Our solar farms are charged $0.045 per kWh that they generate. This means that $0.005 is saved for every kWh generated. That can be used to estimate that an acre of solar canopy would save roughly $3,800 per year.
I thought that I would also include the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s estimate for what a solar retailer would charge per kWh of electricity in our area: $0.036. This would mean that $0.014 could be saved per kWh on a solar canopy system, or roughly $10,650 per acre.
Let me know what else I can find,
Ryan Day
The meeting minutes from the Resilience Team's meeting on 2/28/2020 is attached.
Abby Culloton, a freshman in Civil and Environmental Engineering, put together a project proposal for the SmartWay program and presented it on February 28th. This proposal included why being an affiliate of this program would be beneficial to campus, who/ what departments across campus would be involved, proposed objectives, and other facts that needed to be considered.
Attached is the full proposal.
Land and Water SWATeam meeting minutes from February 26th, 2020. The focus of this meeting was choosing objectives to turn into recommendations.
Women in Engineering (WIE) Grainger First-Year Experience (GFX) student, Abby Culloton, is working with Morgan White and Sinead Soltis at F&S to lead the integration of SmartWay on campus, pending the completion of the EPA SmartWay Affiliate Agency agreement for campus. Abby will do this as part of her class project, and in support of campus sustainability.
East Central Illinois Master Naturalists just formed a Pollinator Taskforce. They are focused on getting more pollinator plants into the community and planning programs associated with pollinators and pollinator plants.
The Extension team created some wonderful handouts that have native plant suggestions for 5 types of habitat. We have been handing those out like crazy. PDFs can be found at (https://extension.illinois.edu/cfiv/pollinator-pockets).
We have the pollinator pocket program (see link above)
Educational Programs held (just ECIMN, does not include programs organized by master gardener programs):
March 18, 2019 – Making Pollinator Habitat Work on the Modern Landscape
May 16, 2019 – Wildflowers
July 15, 2019 – Champaign Prairie Areas
July 22, 2019 – Buzz on Native Bees
August 19, 2019 – Illinois Monarch Project
January 27, 2020 – Native Plants in the Landscape
They just had a table at the Mudpuppy festival and had information on pollinators for children
The Master Gardener program in Vermilion County is mostly organic (unless something crazy happens). The Master Gardeners in Champaign put in a native pollinator garden last year at the IDEA garden on campus.
In the training for MG and MN we talk about pollinators, native plants, and pest management.
I am on the team that did the Retrocommissioning project in 2018 and I would be happy to share some of our knowledge from that process. Below is the link to a presentation of that project that we took to a Big Ten energy conference. Some of our main takeaways are that the combination of chilled beams, dual HX wheels, coil sizing, occupancy ventilation, and thoughtful building pressurization have led to one of the most efficient buildings on campus. Also, the heat pumps work well to heat/cool with electricity, but would be optimal if there were more of a reheat load, or a hot water loop to send reject heat to a neighboring building in summer, which campus is looking into in certain locations.
https://www.fs.illinois.edu/services/utilities-energy/energy-conservation/rcx-energy-results
Andy Robinson, LEED-AP, CEM
DDC Specialist, F&S Energy Services - RCx
The Chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis invited President Killeen to have the University of Illinois participate in the Midwest Climate Summit in fall 2020.
All, I only worked Monday and Tuesday last week as I had a family emergency out of town. Those two days were slow. I picked up some bikes from the warehouse to keep everyone busy. Those bikes are coming along.
This week is business as usual. I’ll look to reschedule some of the meetings I missed in my absence, pick up a couple more bikes, and box some more stuff up for our move.
The numbers:
Visitors: 27
Sales: $106
Membership: 1 for $30
Tires/tubes: 4 for $23
Thanks!
Jacob Benjamin
Manager, Campus Bike Center
Morgan White, John Summers, Jim Sims, Matthew Tomaszewski, and Kent Reifsteck met today to discuss options for incorporating geothermal information into campus policies. The best options are to include geothermal in the Energy Use Policy, update the Campus Administrative Manual to support the updated Energy Use Policy, and include geothermal information in the Facilities Standards. A summary of existing policies and the draft iCAP 2020 objectives linked to geothermal are shown in the attached file.
Attached are the meeting minutes from the Transportation SWATeam meeting on 24 February 2020.
The Agenda is as follows:
Recommendations update
iWG Feedback on SP19 Recommendation: Carbon Credit Fund
Focus on incentives, not punishments.
Make a suggestion on how it could work with TEM.
Find more data on who it would affect and how.
Find out how to calculate the incentive for travelers and get an estimate on total cost per year.
Maybe set the incentive for trips outside of a 3-5 hour driving radius.
CMP update (M. Hubbard)
Recommendations submissions
Attached are the meeting minutes from 2-24-2020. The focus of the meeting was developing recommendations to submit to the iWG.
