PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 28, No. 14, Feb. 19, 2009

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Accountability sought for campus energy use

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

The UI is in the process of acquiring a software system that will enable it to decentralize its budgeting and expenditures for energy when the new fiscal year begins July 1. The software system, which the University of Michigan has used for about five years, is expected to help the UI gain control over its soaring utilities costs by promoting cost-management and individual accountability for energy consumption at the college and departmental levels.

The university, which spends about $100 million annually on energy, has had a shadow billing system in place for about a year and has been issuing energy-usage statements – but not bills – to the units that are its largest energy consumers.

Effective July 1, the 81 academic facilities that use 90 percent of the energy at the Urbana campus will be allocated their own funds to budget and pay for their energy consumption directly. Auxiliary systems buildings such as Assembly Hall, the Illini Union and Housing Division already pay their own energy costs.

To activate a unit-based billing system, the UI is procuring a software package called Energy Billing System that will work with the Banner financial software system and with the Enterprise Distributive Network Architecture system that is used to monitor and control utilities production at Abbott Power Plant.

EBS is a Web-based program that allows departmental users to view historical and current costs and consumption data. The software is designed for the needs of large users with hundreds or thousands of buildings spread across multiple campuses and is capable of operating autonomously or of integrating with existing business systems and automated meter reading/data collection devices.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work that’s required to install and implement this package,” said Terry Ruprecht, director of energy conservation at Facilities and Services. “We’ve started that work while we’re waiting for the purchasing process to be completed.

“The funds that the units will get are based on a base-year consumption. Primarily we will look first and foremost at fiscal year 2008, but we also have pretty good data from FY07.”

As an incentive to be good stewards of their energy dollars, units will be able to retain any savings they achieve “but if their consumption goes up, they’re going to have to cover the overage. That sword swings two ways,” Ruprecht said.

The campus is addressing conservation efforts through several initiatives. A retrocommissioning team, funded by the Academic Facilities Maintenance Fund Assessment Fee paid by students, has renovated heating, ventilation and air conditioning systems in seven buildings – including Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, Newmark Laboratory and Turner Hall – and reduced their energy consumption by an average of 29 percent. The retrocommissioning project has been so successful that the AFMFA advisory committee agreed to fund a second team, which began work last month.

“Each team can only retrocommission six to eight buildings a year,” Ruprecht said. “Once we started seeing the positive results, we knew that we needed a second team if we wanted to make rapid progress.”

Departments on campus have selected 135 people as energy liaisons who will promote energy-management initiatives and accountability within their departments. Andy Blacker, a publicity and promotion specialist at F&S, has been holding orientation meetings with the liaisons over the past few weeks, providing tips for conserving energy and an energy-conservation tool kit that contains posters, fliers and materials the liaisons can use to communicate with their colleagues about energy issues. Because departments have distinctly different environments and operations, the liaisons can customize the materials to meet their units’ needs.

“In the orientations we’re finding that there are pockets of people in the departments who are doing great things as far as energy conservation but there’s been no connection between all of those,” Blacker said. “One of the goals of the liaison program is to create a network across campus so people can share what’s happening in their areas.”

The energy liaisons are not intended to be “energy police” – just colleagues who help build awareness about energy practices and remind people how small changes such as turning off fume hoods, computers and lights when they are not in use can have a significant impact on energy consumption campuswide.

“We’re seeing a lot of enthusiasm from the liaison level,” Ruprecht said. “There are folks who really believe in doing this and understand the importance of using less energy, not only from a cost standpoint but from a climate standpoint. It’s pretty exciting.”

Providing efficient heating, cooling is a changing game

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

The arctic air masses that swept through Illinois this winter have given Abbott Power Plant a workout. Abbott provides the steam that heats most campus buildings and that generates a portion of the campus’s electricity with steam-driven turbines through the process of cogeneration.

“The cogeneration process is more efficient, and as a result costs less and produces less pollution than a commercial power plant,” said Mike Larson, director of utility operations.

The power plant uses a variety of fuel sources – natural gas, fuel oil, and coal  – to produce heat for workplaces, residences, classrooms and the myriad other environments that make up the university campus.

With the bitterly cold temperatures that the campus experienced during January and early February, “peak steam production with the subzero temperatures was around 660,000 pounds an hour,” Larson said. “When we get numbers in that range, we start to lose some of the redundancy” provided by having multiple boilers using a variety of fuel sources. “We could handle a little bit more load, but as we add more load we lessen the amount of backup systems that are able to support the campus in the event something should happen,” Larson said.

During the summer months, steam production may dip to about 300,000 pounds an hour. When the temperatures are soaring outdoors, steam powers some of the chillers that provide air conditioning. The campus has about 30,000 tons of chiller capacity provided by five plants – on Oak Street in Champaign, the North Campus Chiller Plant east of Beckman Institute, at the Main Library, in the Animal Sciences building, and at the Veterinary Medicine complex. The Oak Street plant was constructed as part of a $45 million expansion and upgrade project that centralized the system a few years ago.

“We’re in the process of getting the controls and data at the chiller plants into a common digital control system,” which is expected to take about two years, Larson said.

 Since Abbott was built in 1941, the fuel source for the plant’s boilers has changed several times as the university sought to operate the plant as economically as possible. Abbott’s boilers were all fired by coal when the plant began operating in 1941, but in the early 1970s the campus discontinued burning coal and switched to natural gas, which was to be provided by Illinois Power Co. But when Illinois Power didn’t receive a sufficient allocation to meet the UI’s energy needs, Abbott had to burn fuel oil instead.

In 1978, Illinois Gov. Jim Thompson asked the UI to convert Abbott back to coal to boost the state’s coal industry by demonstrating that the high-sulfur coal mined in Illinois could be burned safely. The plant uses electrostatic precipitators to remove particulates and a wet scrubber to remove potentially hazardous sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory problems, from the plant’s flue gases before they are released into the atmosphere. “The wet scrubber technology that we have for flue gas scrubbing is one of, if not the, best available today, and it has been in place for about 20 years,” Larson said.

“The university has an air permit from the Environmental Protection Agency that regulates how we operate the plant,” Larson said. “On our coal boilers, we have continuous emission monitoring equipment online at all times. If we stray out of the permit-operating parameters, we have to react and report that to the EPA.”

All of the energy-production equipment in Abbott can be monitored and/or controlled online through different software systems.

When fuel oil prices rose as a result of the nation’s oil embargo that began in 1973, three boilers were converted in 1979 so they could run on natural gas or fuel oil, providing the flexibility to take advantage of the best market prices. “Coal has been the cheapest fuel source by far in recent history,” Larson said. “If that changes, we have the flexibility to go either way” with the other fuel sources. “With coal boilers, there are times when you have to take them offline for a week or two for maintenance, and we need some kind of backup in order to do that.”

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