Of the crowd of 60 attendees at the Chief Engineers and Facility Managers Conference, most were from either the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign or another Illinois university or community college.
And despite the size and location of the institution, all who came to Champaign for the conference were looking for advice and ready to share a success, particularly with the general concept: how do we save more energy and money and make our institutions more sustainable?
F&S Utilities & Energy Services division members, including Rob Roman, director, Karl Helmink, energy conservation & retrocommissioning, and Andy Robinson, engineer in energy services administration, detailed a few projects in which an interdisciplinary team goes to a building and improves important building systems and practices. This can include scheduling systems to turn off when a room is not in use. New software, hardware, and switches may be needed to execute. But in the end, savings can be significant.
Funding and manpower were often mentioned as limiting factors; some in the crowd shared other means of applying for grants, rebates, federal acts, and other ways of saving or acquiring money on core utilities, including water and gas.
Hiring is also a common challenge, as voiced by UIC Utilities Assistant Director Cedric Everett. “We’re routinely down 15 engineers, and constantly having more retirements, and shifting to significant overtime. We want to implement an apprentice program [like at F&S] to help fill that gap. [Hiring] is a huge challenge and something that we face every day.”
The first event was a conversation led by Roman, who “threatened” he’d start singing karaoke if people in the room stayed too quiet—it encouraged many participants! His introduction included how proud he is to work at Illinois and at this time in energy history.
“When I got into this business, there was just some new technologies in commercial power,” Roman said. “There was coal, nuclear, and a little natural gas, and then things started changing. What a time to be in this business, because we went from those and now we’re thinking about things the Jetsons were thinking about. We’re really close to our researchers and we do things at Abbott Power Plant, in the buildings, in the distribution system, that are cutting edge technology. And other universities get to be part of this.”
Many F&S experts spoke during the two-day conference, including in an Energy Conservation roundtable, a talk about analytics and advanced scheduling software, dashboards, energy and heat recovery systems, construction design examples, lessons taken from retrocommissioning at a cleanroom, codes and the future of all-gender restrooms, hiring and building the right culture, and document management.