Mr. Andy Robinson, Management Engineer, F&S Energy Services – RCx Team, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Dr. Andrew Stumpf, Principal Research Scientist, Prairie Research Institute; Research Affiliate, Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
The Campus Instructional Facility comprises the largest geothermal energy system implemented at the university so far. The CIF system is the fifth geothermal installation at UIUC and can provide 135 thermal-tons of heating and/or cooling, twice as much as the next most recent geothermal installation on campus property. Located at the southeast corner of Springfield Avenue and Wright Street in Urbana, the $75M CIF is a state-of-the-art 122,000 gross square foot facility supports The Grainger College of Engineering’s transformative learning and teaching environments. The geothermal system comprises 40 vertical borehole exchange loops in the adjacent Bardeen Quadrangle and has enough capacity to handle the energy needed for approximately 30 American homes.
Event: This event comprises educational and social components at the Campus Instructional Facility (CIF).
- 4:00 – 4:10 p.m.: The speakers will provide an overview of geothermal energy systems. They will focus on the geothermal heating and cooling system employed at the Campus Instructional Facility (CIF).
- 4:10 – 5:00 p.m.: Participants will tour the salient components of the geothermal heating and cooling system inside the Campus Instructional Facility (CIF).
- 5:00 – 5:30 p.m.: Refreshments at the CIF’s Auditorium, and chance to interact with the speakers and with your fellow graduate students.
Mr. Andy Robinson is a Management Engineer for the University of Illinois Retrocommissioning team leading six HVAC technicians plus an engineer/programmer to save energy in campus buildings. He holds a Masters in Engineering (Energy Systems) from the U of I, is a Certified Energy Manager, and is LEED-accredited. He has 15 years of experience in building energy analysis, modeling, HVAC/DDC programming with Siemens and Schneider systems, and community energy education. As an undergrad at Trinity College, Hartford, Robinson had a summer internship on a French research ship off the coast of Asia, collecting historical climate data from the deep-sea core samples. His first career work was with an East-coast marine survey company, where he processed data from side-scan sonar surveys of underwater sites for wind turbines, power cables, and pipelines. After a weekend trip to the ’07 Solar Decathlon on the mall in Washington DC, Robinson signed up for a LEED certification course with a local green architectural firm. Back in Illinois, he worked for 10 years with the Smart Energy Design Assistance Center in Champaign, IL before moving to the RCx team at Facilities and Services. He is also a member of his church’s green team and helps give outreach talks for the UC community solar group-buy program.
Dr. Andrew Stumpf is a Geologist at the Illinois State Geological Survey, a Division of the Prairie Research Institute. For the past 25 years, he has been studying the landforms and processes of glaciated terrains throughout North America that have critical societal impacts. He is Review Editor for Frontiers in Water and a member of the editorial board for the Geoenergy Journal. He is a Tiger Team Member of the US Department of Energy’s National Consortium for the Advancement of Long-Duration Energy Storage (LDES), He is also a Member of the Administrative Council, North Central Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (NCR-SARE). Dr. Stumpf further serves among many technical committees and is a member of the Research Committee of the International Ground Source Heat Pump Association (IGSHPA).