The University of Illinois has canceled its plans to build wind turbines on campus, citing the university's "
The University of Illinois has canceled its plans to build wind turbines on campus, citing the university's "deteriorating fiscal condition."..........
A contract for GE to build and deliver a 1.5-megawatt wind turbine for the South Farms was sent last week to the university from GE, but university officials did not sign it.
Chancellor Richard Herman on Thursday notified GE and student leaders of the university's decision to halt the project.
Given the "deteriorating fiscal condition" of the university – the state recently asked the university to hold 2.5 percent of its state appropriation in reserve – "we've got to spend money where there's a rapid payback," said Dick Warner, a professor in Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences and director of the university's new Office of Sustainability.
"In the fiscal situation we're in, we need to be looking for things that have immediate cost savings," Warner said.
One turbine would have generated about 1 percent of the campus's energy needs.
"Basically (the turbine) was more symbolic than it was adding to the energy capacity of the campus," said Jack Dempsey, executive director of Facilities and Services at the UI.
It's always cheaper to reduce consumption, he said.
"A kilowatt reduced costs nothing as opposed to a kilowatt produced more efficiently. It's always cheaper to reduce consumption. That's been our goal and the chancellor's stated goal for last two years," Dempsey said.
The wind energy project, announced in 2005, originally called for installing three turbines. Over the years, demand for wind turbines pushed prices higher, said Kent Reifsteck, director of engineering services at the university. And the project was scaled down from three turbines to one, and the budget was reduced from $5.7 million to $4.6 million.
Student who have long supported the wind turbines said they were disappointed and stunned when they heard about the project's demise.
"It's pretty awful. Everyone's really shocked right now," said Amanda Schield, president of Students for Environmental Concerns, the student group that in 2003 rallied support for a $2 per-semester fee that would pay for clean energy projects, like the turbines, on campus. About $300,000 raised from the fees was allocated for the wind energy project. The university would have received a $2 million grant from the Illinois Clean Energy Foundation to help pay for the turbines.
Schield and other environmental leaders on campus have asked students to call or e-mail university administrators with their concerns, "but it's hard. It's finals week. Everyone is busy and stressed," she said.
"Many people fought for this for years," said Suhail Barot, UI graduate student and chair of the student sustainability committee. "If we had known about the funding shortfall ... we could have gone and looked for grants or donations, but they never gave us a chance," he said.
The university's move to pull the plug on the project shows the university is not committed to sustainability, he said.
The decision to cancel the wind energy project comes less than a year after the university signed the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment, a statement that called for, among other things, reducing greenhouse gases and using or buying more renewable energy.
As many colleges and universities have become interested in renewable energies, more colleges in recent years have considered installing wind turbines on their campuses, according to Julian Dautremont-Smith, associate director of the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education. Colleges with turbines include, for example, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Vermont, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Montana.
Dautremont-Smith said he has heard about schools facing challenges, such as the increase in price due to rising demand.
"I still think schools are finding ways to pencil it out. It's a good long-term investment," he said.
Many schools have opted for smaller-scale wind turbines, such as those below 100 kilowatts, and those can "still provide a symbol of the university's commitment to sustainability. And they have a reasonable payback period," he said.
"There's no doubt that the students would feel as though a wind turbine sitting out on the South Farms, visible to all, presents an appearance of sustainability," said Helen Coleman, director of planning at the university. But the university is already working on "proven" sustainability campus projects, such as biofuels research, buying hybrid and electric cars and recycling, she said.
In recent months the university has focused more on trying to pick "low-hanging fruit, to find things with immediate payoff," Warner said.
And that means tackling some not-so-visible projects such as heating, air conditioning and ventilation systems around campus, he said.
"We are interested in deploying a wide variety of alternative energy sources on our campuses," he said.
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