Two new Stewarding Excellence @ Illinois project review teams will examine campus utility consumption and space utilization.
The number of project review teams is now 17. Each team has been asked to evaluate a specific area or unit of the Urbana campus to determine if there are ways to cut costs.
Six reports have been released and are posted on the Stewarding Excellence @ Illinois website. Public comments on each report are accepted online for 14 days from the time the report is released. A link to the public comment page can be found just below the link for each report.
Three reports remain open for comment: the Graduate College (closes May 20), campus programs supporting teaching (closes June 1) and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Public Engagement (closes May 28).
Utilities
Few people understand where the campus gets its fuel and electricity – which account for an $80 million energy budget – and how they are used, said Terry Ruprecht, the director of energy services and a member of the utilities review team.
Increasing this understanding is among the team’s goals, Ruprecht said.
Jeff Oberg, an assistant dean in the College of Engineering, chairs the committee.
“The average person on campus doesn’t know much about the energy picture,” Ruprecht said.
The team will explore ways to provide incentives for campus groups to reduce energy use, and determine if it is possible for units and departments to share in the savings.
First the team will review sources and uses of the campus energy budget, including Abbott Power Plant; the parts of campus that purchase electricity from off-campus; fixed and variable costs of energy; debt service; commodity prices; and operating budgets.
“The variable costs of the operation – primarily fuel and purchased electricity – are direct functions of what is consumed in the buildings,” Ruprecht said. “They vary as a function of demand on the system.”
Ruprecht likens the fixed and variable cost aspects of energy consumption to car maintenance.
No matter how many miles you drive, you still must pay for registration and license plates, which are fixed costs, he said. But by decreasing the number of miles you drive, you can reduce tire replacements and gasoline costs – the variable costs.
“For example, if you turned off (all the electricity at) Wohlers Hall, you’d see the variable costs drop,” he said.
Other costs, however, such as boiler replacement at Abbott, debt service on the plant and other maintenance costs are fixed.
Debt service to Abbott includes costs the UI incurred for additions and upgrades over the last 10 years. In addition to debt service, the campus inherited a $100 million accrued operating deficit from fuel and operating costs that exceeded budget allocations when Abbott was operated by the university not the campus.
Taking all of these factors into consideration, the review team will establish a “widely understood campus rate” that includes the cost of all energy consumption factors, including electricity created on campus and electricity purchased from Ameren Illinois Utilities, as well as all the other fixed and variable costs associated with energy consumption.
Ruprecht said that some units – including Housing, the Illini Union and Assembly Hall, and commercial customers such as the Research Park – pay Ameren for their utilities. Academic and administrative units don’t pay for the energy they use from Abbott, but their consumption is tracked, he said.
The review team also will explore whether campus units that would like to conserve energy could get their programs under way with the help of groups such as the Student Sustainability Committee.
Space utilization
The project review team examining space utilization, chaired by Dale Van Harlingen, professor and head of physics, will look at how office, laboratory and classroom space is allocated on campus and also how the campus leases space in the surrounding area.
The team’s charge letter states that the methods the campus uses to assign space are decentralized and in effect, inefficient.
“For example, little space is shared across units, many spaces are underutilized across time periods during the day, and some faculty members have multiple work spaces,” the letter said. “Moreover, we are spending in excess of $4 million on rental space off campus, including locations at the Research Park, on Green Street and in Chicago.”
The review team will explore changes in space utilization policies over the last decade, cost reductions in leased spaces and more creative solutions for space management.
