The Big Ten and Friends Sustainability group is collaborating on a Prospectus about how sustainability helps the universities accomplish several of their missions.  Each participating school was asked to note their high-level and visionary goal for the Prospectus and the Big Ten group as a whole.  Sustainability staff at UIUC offered the following goals:

What are your goals for using the outcomes of the Big Ten Prospectus at your institution?  “The University of Illinois Provost Office (budgetary authority) is interested in evaluating the appropriate funding model for our sustainability efforts, and we hope to use the outcomes from the Prospectus to help inform them about the importance and benefit of the overall sustainability efforts, and how it ties directly to the campus mission.”

What potential (think big!) do you see for our network as a whole?  How can this work help us leverage regional impacts, move all of our institutions forward, etc.? “We have been making great strides in sustainability, but campus continues to elevate other mission priorities over sustainability when achieving these goals is considered cumbersome or unfeasible. We hope that through this Prospectus, the Big Ten and, subsequently, campuses across the nation will see that sustainability is a mission-critical goal, and will not proceed with any action until it can be made sustainable. Could we also partner on various efforts, from Carbon Credits to recycled paper purchases to RECs, etc. to save money and effort? We should also update the website at http://greenbigten.msu.edu/index.html and https://wikispaces.psu.edu/display/Big10EnvStew/Big+Ten+Environmental+St....”

The Zipcar Brand Ambassadors joined the Transportation Demand Management team at Quad Day this fall.  They handed out all the promotional information they had with them in the first forty minutes of the four hour event, and then shared sustainable transportation materials along Green Street for the remainder of the afternoon.

Also, F&S is looking into digital sign materials to promote Zipcar.

The Illinois map has a category called bike racks.  These were added based on a student survey done several years ago.  The Active Transportation Coordinator is working with GIS Specialist James Whitacre, and student volunteers, to update the data and the campus map.  This should be completed during FY17.

The Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA) is coordinating programs which could be helpful for funding on-campus solar installations:

http://secondnature.org/solar-university-network/

http://www.solarendowment.org/about/

The Students for Environmental ConcernS (SECS) meet regularly each year.  The announcement for the first 2016-2017 meeting is attached here.

Brian Finet shared a preliminary sketched layout for the Speech and Hearing Rooftop Solar PV, in a short meeting with Morgan Johnston and Robert Halverson.  During the spring funding meeting of the Student Sustainability Committee, they questioned if it was possible to do a scalable design for this building, so more than the originally funded 11kW could be installed in the future.  The answer is yes, this is highly scalable.

August, 2016, a new initiative towards promoting departments to start their own bicycle fleets began. Lily Wilcock, Active Transportation Coordinator, took on myself (Logan Ebeling), a student intern to help with this project. I am participating in the project as part of ENVS 491, a class required for my Sustainability Minor. 

This project is an evolution from the Departmental Bike Sharing project (see Associated Projects) and is using materials from that project and is drawing off its success. 

We met August 24th at the Campus Bike Center to discuss goals for this semester. We settled on two broad goals: First, assessing the health, challenges, and success of already existing departmental bicycle fleets and second, promoting the formation of new bicycle fleets on campus.  

Sarthak Prasad developed the iCAP Portal User Manual with the instructions and help from Morgan Johnston, Stephanie Lage, Olivia Webb, Michael McKelvey, and Andrew Stengele.

Morgan Johnston, Robert Halverson, and Brian Finet met to discuss the design needs of the Speech and Hearing Rooftop Solar PVs project (on building #209).  Key points discussed are:

Per the building occupants, this project needs to be installed at the same time as the Capital Project in that building, currently scheduled for summer 2017.  Therefore, the bulk of the design needs to be completed by December 2016, and the installation methodology should be clarified in September or October, 2016.

The project must be metered, in order to track the solar energy generation.  There are several metering options and considerations to be addressed.  The meter needs to track real-time energy generation from the array, but this project does not currently include setting up a dashboard website specifically for this array.

Discussion about the pros and cons of various mounting methods were discussed.  Additional potential for rooftop leaks are the primary concern for building occupants and maintenance contacts.  The most manageable installation style is to connect the solar panels to an existing load bearing column for the building.  Ballast style installations, while not creating an immediate rooftop penetration point, are very likely to wear on the roof and create non-point source leaks which are hard to find and eliminate.  Additionally, with a ballasted mounting system the snow load is difficult to calculate due to the unpredictable effect of snow drifts.

Ava Heap and Andrew Stumpf requested assistance from Morgan Johnston on an SSC project proposal for the Idea Garden rooftop solar.  Kristine provided a summary of the open issues to be addressed:

• Survey of all electric loads to be placed on the system, 
• if heating the shed is necessary and to be included,
• where batteries would be stored, and
• if the shed can support the panels (although that did not appear to be a problem).

Morgan will work with Ava to clarify the needs of this project.