Meeting Minutes 4.3.17

In attendance:

Josh Feldman – SWATeam Clerk

Shuang Chen

Ximing Cai – iSEE director

Summary:

Due to poor scheduling, several members were not able to show up to the meeting. However, it was a good chance for Shuang Chen, a student who is working to update the iCAP portal objectives, to learn about the group. Also, the new iSEE director Ximing Cai was in attendance, and plans to attend future transportation SWATeam meetings.

Shuang had several questions to ask about the transportation SWATeam’s objectives. Josh answered the questions to the best of his knowledge and also wrote down the questions so that other members of the team could respond via email. Below are the questions.

-          Can you provide a good overview of the bike plan and the fleet objectives?

-          What is the main purpose of the UI fleet? Transportation? Construction?

-          What is the exact amount/percentage of air travel emissions our campus produces?

-          Which objective do you believe is the most important? Which has impressed you the most, or made the most progress?

-          How does our bike plan compare with other universities’ bike plans?

Next meeting: Thursday 4/13 at 1pm

Updates and discussion of greywater meter, greywater design standards, cooling tower cycles of concentration, water use dashboard, and student outreach. 

The "invitation for bid" for our campus's purchase of offsets (both to replace those we sold to BPTN, and also to open our "offsets storeroom") has now been released, and bids will be opened in mid-April. 

All, the shop was closed for Spring Break, so going back two weeks to 3/13 – 3/17: Visitors totaled 60. We grossed $839.20. We sold 4 memberships for $120; one refurbished bike for $180; and one build-a-bike for $134.

This week I will be prepping for summer staff, building bikes, organizing/cleaning, getting in touch with the new supply representative, and attempting to streamline the reporting of stolen bikes.

Additionally, the Bike Project is hosting a bike light giveaway at Douglass Park in Champaign on Sunday (April 2nd;  2 - 5pm) that I will promote this week.

Sincerely,

• Jake Benjamin
  Campus Bike Center Manager

The UI Extension and F&S Grounds have agreed upon a Memo of Understanding (MOU) for the maintenance and care of the Red Oak Rain Garden.  An unsigned copy is attached here, and it will be routed for signature.

Below is information provided by Jeremy Overmann, B.S. Ch. E., Water Treatment Specialist, on the water use and cycles of concentration (COC) in a cooling tower, as requested after a Land and Water SWAT meeting. 

"

Water SWAT members,

Here is some more information regarding the cooling tower discussion at today’s meeting.

This first graph shows how much water a typical 100 ton Cooling Tower uses per hour, and how this changes when the tower is operated at various Cycles of Concentration (COC)

NOTE:  a 1 ton cooling tower can remove 15,000 BTU/hr of heat.

Most standard chemically treated Cooling Towers use unsoftened water and operate between 4 – 6 COC, depending on the source water quality (also called Make-Up water) and the efficacy of the chemical treatment program.

As COC increases, the potential for formation of calcium scale (and possibly other types of scale) increases.  Scale deposits reduce the energy efficiency of the chiller and the cooling tower, and result in the need for labor intensive cleaning to remove the scale.

The following table shows the relationship between volume of Cooling Tower blowdown (bleed), blowdown rate (% bleed), COC, and total water usage.

Cycles of Concentration is controlled by choosing the rate of blowdown.  This is done by controlling the blowdown (bleed) valve at the bottom of the tower.

In a “Zero” blowdown cooling tower, softened water is used, and cycles of concentration ranges from 20 – 100 or higher.  To achieve proper water chemistry to provide corrosion protection, usually need to operate at > 20 COC. 

During the Champaign Regional Office Building study, the highest COC achieved was 51.  The blowdown valve is turned off, however some water is lost from leaks in the tower, and from droplets of water that escape with the air that is drawn through the tower.

"

The University pays a stormwater utility fee to both the City of Urbana and the City of Champaign.  The fee is based on total impervious area that drains into city-owned storm sewers. If stormwater drains into university-owned sewers then directly discharges to a receiving stream, there is no fee assessed.

• The current rate for the City of Champaign is $5.24/3,478 sq ft.
• The current rate for the City of Urbana is $5.14/3,100 sq ft.

There are credits and incentives that the university can apply toward the stormwater utility fee. By maintaining compliance with the university’s Municipal Separate Storm Sewer System (MS4) National Pollutant Discharge Elimination Systems (NPDES), the university receives a 5% credit from each city. Additionally, each city has their own Credit and Incentive Manual (attached) which provides an opportunity for the university to reduce their stormwater utility fee by reducing the impact of the runoff from their properties by methods such as installing sustainable storm water practices that allow stormwater to infiltrate into the ground. The manuals have specific guidelines on how to calculate the credits based on the particular stormwater practices that are employed.

Hi Solar UC Advisory Committee,

The Midwest Renewable Energy Association (MREA) has accepted the Solar Urbana-Champaign Advisory Committee’s recommendation and contracted with New Prairie Construction to install solar arrays for the second round of our group buy program.  MREA and New Prairie Construction have agreed to an amended fee schedule whereby New Prairie will be providing a rebate which will be paid to program participants who sign a contract for services by August 31, 2017 according to the following schedule: $.03/watt if the program reaches 50-150 kW of total capacity; $.06/watt for 150-250 kW; $.09/watt for installed capacity in excess of 250 kW. 

Please keep an eye on solarurbanachampaign.com as we will be announcing Solar Power Hours very soon.  Please share these event announcements through your networks and let us know of any ideas for additional public engagement.

Thanks!

Scott

Scott R. Tess

Environmental Sustainability Manager

City of Urbana, IL

P: 217-384-2381   -   F: 217-819-3167

706 S. Glover Ave. Urbana, IL 61802

Walk Score® – 61 out of 100

Bike Routes – www.urbanaillinois.us/bike-urbana

Plan Your Bus Trip – http://www.cumtd.com or 384-8188

Diliya Murtazina and Morgan Johnston reviewed the work tasks completed this year, and identified files to finalize for the end of this project. Diliya will formalize the behavior change strategies document, collect all the example images, and provide documentation on the creation of the building level energy charts with examples.