Sitton Award winner Rudy LaFave, center, talks with a legislator at the State Capitol along with other members of the 2024 Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) cohort during their spring break trip to Springfield. Credit: Erin Minor/iSEE
The Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment (iSEE) has announced the first winner of the newly established Doug and Dawn Sitton Award, designed to help University of Illinois undergraduates improve their career prospects in sustainability fields.
Rudy LaFave, a junior majoring in Agricultural and Consumer Economics, received a stipend to work as a legislative intern with the Illinois Environmental Council (IEC) in May through the end of the spring legislative session.
This award was made possible by a generous endowment from Doug and Dawn Sitton. Doug Sitton, a 1980 Illinois graduate, is senior principal and client executive at IMEG Corp. and founder of Sitton Energy Solutions, an Illinois-based energy management firm that merged with IMEG in 2022.
“We are excited to partner with the Illinois Environmental Council to offer this unique opportunity to our students,” said iSEE Alvin H. Baum Family Fund Director Madhu Khanna, Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at Illinois. “We are grateful to Doug Sitton for his support for iSEE and this new initiative, which builds on our Environmental Leadership Program (ELP) to give students additional experience in environmental policy and advocacy.”
The Sitton Award was created to support educational opportunities and internships for U of I students that can lead to career opportunities when they graduate. iSEE plans to partner with outside companies and organizations like IEC to provide internships that might not otherwise exist, according to Eric Green, iSEE’s Senior Academic Program Instructor/Advisor.
“Dawn and I are proud to partner with iSEE to help continue the University of Illinois’ leadership in sustainability, including providing opportunities that help students develop into future leaders in the sustainability field,” Doug Sitton said.
Doug Sitton
LaFave received a $2,500 award from iSEE, and IEC provided a stipend for housing and food. LaFave worked with the IEC on fossil-fuel divestment legislation as a member of the Spring 2024 ELP cohort; IEC Executive Director Jennifer Walling is a member of the ELP Advisory Board.
During his three-week internship, which began May 13, LaFave was expected to work closely with IEC’s Legislative Team during the closing weeks of the spring session: attending committee meetings and events; monitoring bills and other items that arise; and providing administrative support for IEC staff.
IEC Chief of Staff Chelsea Biggs, who worked with Green to develop the position, said IEC was looking for additional support during the busy end-of-session period, so the internship was a perfect fit.
“It’s a unique opportunity for students to see firsthand how the last weeks of session come together and how bills become laws with the active engagement of advocates and lobbyists,” Biggs said. “We were impressed by Rudy’s work in the ELP, and we’re thrilled to have him on board.”
LaFave, who focuses on environmental economics and policy, is president of the Illinois Student Council and has served as co-vice president of Students for Environmental Concerns (SECS) and Environmental Action Director for the Illini Democrats.
— News release by iSEE Communications Specialist Julie Wurth
The iCOVER (Innovated Cover-crop Opportunity, Verification, and Economy stimulating technology for underserved farmers using Robotics) Project is researching innovative, equitable ways for farmers to plant cover crops using cutting-edge technology. Originally seed-funded by iSEE, the team received $4,999,999 in funding in 2022 from the USDA’s Climate-Smart Commodities program.
iCOVER Primary Investigator Girish Chowdhary offers answers to some Frequently Asked Questions about the project.
Why are cover crops important to climate-smart agriculture?
Here in the Midwest, we typically only grow cash crops — which are typically corn and soy rotations. About 200 million acres of corn and soy are grown in the Midwest annually, which results in the field being left fallow for most of the year. This creates problems like weeds taking over the fields, soil erosion due to wind, and nitrogen overflows that get into our waterways.
Cover crops are a way to cover the ground during that fallow season and prevent these problems. For example, rye and hairy vetch, common cover crops used in this region, can hold any excess nitrogen that the farmer sprays and fix nitrogen in the soil. That might reduce the amount of nitrogen the farmer has to put on the field the next year. Other plants like turnips break up soil compaction and can be used for grazing animals if farmers want to integrate animals onto the fields during fall and spring. Lastly, all cover crops help with retaining moisture, preventing weeds from taking over, and adding biodiversity into the soil.
How does iCOVER’s work make it easier for farmers to plant cover crops?
iCOVER is really trying to help farmers adopt new ways of cover crop planting that are lower cost and that can scale up more easily.
Right now, farmers struggle with finding the time to plant cover crops. Even though the benefits are well known, cover crop adoption is pretty low: 10% or less. The problem is that farmers can only plant cover crops after the harvest is done, which is late September or October. There’s not a lot of green season left, and it’s an extra task for farmers to go over the field and plant the cover crops.
iCOVER is propagating two novel ways of cover crop planting that can allow in-season cover crop planting using aerial drones and ground robots. This means farmers can plant cover crops earlier in the year — in August or as early as July if they’d like to. That way the crops get more time to establish, and when the field is harvested there’s already a green cover on the ground. This also has benefits of storing a lot more carbon into the ground, but even just from a soil regeneration perspective, it creates a longer season for these cover crops to grow.
How does the cost of robotic cover crop planting compare to the traditional method?
We are working with economists like Shadi Atallah and Madhu Khanna, who have been advising us. We foresee that cover crop planting with autonomous ground robots can go as low as $10 an acre, which is 50% cheaper than what farmers would pay if they were to do cover crop planting with tractors. Plus, it removes all the hassle and results in a better output.
With drones, it could be as low as that, but we’re trying to overcome some technical challenges due to their battery usage … and batteries are more expensive. But in theory, we see a significant cost reduction over what farmers are paying today.
What kind of soil research is iCOVER doing?
We’re creating ways to measure cover crop using remote sensing. This helps farmers to know how much cover crop has grown. We’ve invested in methods to measure in-ground carbon accumulation and spectroscopy using some technologies that are still in early stages of development.
iCOVER is scaling this research up across multiple states. What is it like coordinating across multiple states and different regions?
iCOVER is a partner of the USDA’s Climate Smart Commodities program and has received much of its funding from that program. The goal for this year is to plant around 2,000 acres, which is a pretty aggressive scale for these new types of technologies. Over the next four years, we’re scaling up to 10,000 acres. We have some industry partners who are helping with that. They’re working with farmers to figure out how we can grow the scale.
Demand from farmers is not the challenge, but logistics and coordination are. We also have a lot of requirements from the government to make sure that everything is well documented.
The way iCOVER works is farmers get monetary incentives through the project to adopt cover crops. Because it’s an innovative technology project, there’s some investment in the technology development and deployment. Here in Illinois, we are mostly focusing on cover crop planting with robots and drones. Then at the University, we’re investigating novel ways of measuring carbon in the ground. The third area of research is smallholder farms in Alabama, to see if these methods can be used in those circumstances as well.
So, most of the crops are here in the Midwest with a few satellite farms in Alabama starting around 500 acres and growing to 2,000 acres over the next three years.
The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is well past the halfway point from Illinois Climate Action Plan 2020 to iCAP 2025. It’s time to check in on each of the iCAP chapters to gauge progress, address the challenges our campus faces, and celebrate some achievements. This month, iSEE Communications Intern Gabe Lareau examines the Engagement chapter to see what the university is doing to immerse campus in a culture of sustainability. He also recaps the progress and challenges as we begin the drafting process for iCAP 2025 — which will mark 25 years (or hopefully less) until campus reaches carbon neutrality. View the full series >>>
More than 4,000 students took part in the Spring 2024 “Sustainapalooza” organized by the Student Sustainability Leadership Council and co-hosted by iSEE, the Student Sustainability Committee, Students for Environmental Concerns, and the Illini Union Board. The event featured tabling by sustainability organizations, iSEE’s free clothing swap, a sustainable art show, food, and music. Credits: Diana Gonzaga/iSEE Communications
They may seem like basic questions:
Do you know how composting works?
Are you up to date on what can be recycled, and what can’t?
What do you know about the Illinois Climate Action Plan?
But for taking the pulse of sustainability literacy at the University of Illinois, these questions are vital to see how knowledgeable, up to snuff, and aware the campus actually is. Or, in another word, engaged.
For Codie Sterner, the word is literally in the job description. Appointed last year as Student Affairs’ Coordinator for Student Sustainability and the Engagement iCAP Team Chair, he knew that crafting a sustainability survey for university staff was of “exponential importance” early on. The Education Team is preparing a similar survey for incoming students.
According to Sterner, there’s a knowledge gap on campus: “There’s been a ton of interest with sustainability literacy. We’ve been getting questions like, ‘Hey, we would love to know what to do to make this a green event, but we actually don’t know what to do.’ ”
The sustainability literacy survey for university staff, due to be released soon, is just one of the main successes in the engagement realm. Others — successfully working with the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics (DIA) to join the Green Sports Alliance, increasing the number of Green Events certifications, and making regular updates to the iCAP Portal website — have been paramount to fulfilling the team’s iCAP 2020 objectives.
But, as with every other iCAP chapter’s objectives list, challenges still lie ahead. Most for the Engagement Team revolve around one fact: With a university as large and diverse as Illinois, the team is still trying to tailor messaging to as much of campus as possible.
Part of that process has been a heavier focus on some objectives over others and, in some cases, a complete restructuring. Take for example Objectives 7.4 and 7.5, respectively: using GivePulse — a volunteer, engagement, and fundraising service — to bolster campus-community collaboration on sustainability issues; and holding an annual Youth Sustainability Summit as part of a broader effort to teach children environmental stewardship.
For Sterner and the rest of the team members — all of whom have participated for only a year — evaluating if these objectives are the best ways to engage campus is a valid question.
“We dug into some of these objectives,” Sterner said. “Maybe some of them don’t necessarily need to be replaced, but they might not be as applicable today as they were originally. We’ve had to ask, ‘How do you reframe the question? How do we modernize it?’ A lot of stuff has changed since 2020.”
The iCAP Engagement Team has worked with the Illini Union, Athletics, and other iCAP teams on sustainability initiatives — and campaigned to find volunteers for myriad events. However, its main challenge is defining what its role should be as campus pushes to net zero.
No argument there. But what to do in the meantime? The answer: Be as multi-purpose as a Swiss Army knife.
The Engagement Team has become the Illinois Climate Action Plan’s all-in-one resource. It is the iCAP’s central connectivity hub, Army Reserves, and PR team: If any of the iCAP teams need boots on the ground fast, the Engagement Team is ready to deploy.
Nowhere was this more apparent than during the university’s most recent Zero Waste events. “We had people asking where they could get volunteers,” Sterner said. “So one of our students on our team worked with the Office of Civic Life, and we were able to generate a lot of volunteers for these programs for the Zero Waste Team.”
Other ongoing sustainability programs, like Green Quad Day and “Sustainapalooza”— an event newly conceived by the Student Sustainability Leadership Council (SSLC) — were identified by the Engagement Team as opportunities to collaborate with other campus sustainability organizations in mobilizing students to get them involved in campus sustainability projects.
Or, put more succinctly by Sterner, “Get a group that’s passionate enough, realign everyone’s goals, and move forward rapidly.”
Sounds a lot like engagement.
Wrapping up our iCAP retrospective …
So, where do we go from here? Based on our roundup of progress and challenges since iCAP 2020, the University of Illinois community must keep three main things in mind if it truly wants to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions no later than 2050:
Energy, Energy, Energy
How each iCAP chapter directly impacts the university’s greenhouse gas emissions varies significantly. The vast majority of our carbon emissions come from how campus makes its energy, which is mostly through the fossil fuel-powered Abbott Power Plant.
Campus has pursued almost every option for renewable energy available — solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear — but all of those and more will be required to cut university emissions to zero.
The U of I has made progress on that front. In 2008, the university emitted 575,088 tons of greenhouse gases. In 2023, that dropped to 391,279 tons, within reach of the 2025 goal of 344,906 tons.
Individual actions, like turning off lights, unplugging electronics, using more efficient appliances, and taking shorter showers, can aid in reducing that figure only en masse. And still they will not be enough to get campus emissions to zero. Therefore, campus must continually emphasize updating its energy infrastructure as the priority.
It’s all interconnected
We’ve had a drought the past two years here in Champaign-Urbana, which has killed a significant number of trees that were planted on campus to help us reach our Land & Water goals. The lack of trees, in turn, makes our community less resilient to increased stormwater surge.
Just one example of how the problems that each iCAP chapter tackles are so intertwined. That idea applies to solutions as well.
Perhaps the most effective way to reduce university emissions isn’t by re-engineering solar panels to be a fraction of a percent more efficient. Instead, it could be through advocacy. Maybe the best way to get people to reduce driving time is by making walkways and bike paths more shaded and, therefore, more enjoyable. Or perhaps students in the university’s Environmental Leadership Program (a successfully completed objective in the Education chapter) could even lobby lawmakers to ban state institutions from using, or investing in, fossil fuels.
Thinking of the climate issue on our campus or anywhere through the lens of one single discipline, cause, or iCAP chapter only narrows our solutions. Seeing our individual work as something that can have vast repercussions — whether good or ill — can make us more aware and deliberate in our decisions as the university continues toward net zero.
Let the students lead
Finally, campus must never forget its greatest asset and very reason for existence: Its students. Our generation and those of the future will live with climate change’s worst effects — things that we were not necessarily responsible for creating.
As an individual of this campus and a resident of this planet, by far the most impactful thing you can do is get yourself, as well as others, involved. At a university with over 50,000 people, changing the energy infrastructure, cutting down on food and plastic waste, reducing energy and water demand, and advocating for land management practices that increase carbon storage can only be accomplished together.
“Since the iCAP 2020, we’ve made major progress to decrease our carbon footprint and improve environmental sustainability on campus. This is the result of cross-campus efforts led by Facilities & Services, the iCAP teams, iSEE, and other partners in sustainability efforts like the Illini Union, DIA, the Office of Student Success, Inclusion and Belonging, and many others – notably the Student Sustainability Committee and student groups that help mobilize support for sustainability initiatives,” said iSEE Sustainability Programs Coordinator Miriam Keep.
“There is still much work ahead of us, and we look forward to continuing to work across campus and build new partnerships to meet our long-term sustainability goals with the iCAP 2025!”
There is a place for everyone here, not just the scientists or the engineers or the communications experts. Skilled and willed people from every discipline and every background are needed to get our campus to net zero.
And by banding our voices together, we might advocate for the necessary change at a larger level: asking the Urbana-Champaign campus, the University of Illinois system, and the state that governs it to align their wallet with their words.
For centuries, we Illini have gone on to do great things in the world. That process does not have to start after we walk across the graduation stage. If we can truly change our complex, large university into a bastion of climate action, more organizations — other universities, corporations, governments — will see proof that sustainability is truly possible, and then, hopefully, follow in our footsteps.
Jessika Trancik is a professor at the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research examines the dynamic costs, performance, and environmental impacts of energy systems to inform climate policy and accelerate beneficial and equitable technology innovation. Her projects focus on all energy services — including electricity, transportation, heating, and industrial processes. This work spans solar energy, wind energy, energy storage, low-carbon fuels, electric vehicles, and nuclear fission, among other technologies. She is also an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute, and was formerly at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and at WSP International/UNOPS (now Interpeace) in Geneva.
April Wendling: Could you tell me a bit about your area of study?
Jessika Trancik: My work focuses on evaluating different potential climate solutions with a particular focus on energy solutions. I develop data-informed models to understand the impacts of those solutions and which ones might be most promising to invest in developing further. The idea is to use data-informed models to anticipate what sorts of energy solutions can be used to achieve the best outcomes. And information from these models can allow decision-makers to be deliberate about the investments they’re making in this transition, given the limited time to mitigate climate change and the finite financial resources available.
AW: What do these models look like?
JT: One example we’ve worked on quite a bit is modeling optimal locations for electric vehicle charging stations. One of the research questions we asked was: where should we place chargers so that people can conveniently charge their vehicles? Also, what is the rate of charging that would be needed in each of those different locations? There are a lot of factors that you need to take into consideration for a model like this. There’s the capacity of the batteries and range of the vehicles, where do people naturally stop and for how long, and how predictable are those behavioral patterns?
And what we find is that if you just haphazardly install chargers at, for example, shopping centers or malls, rather than in deliberate locations based on our understanding of how people use their vehicles, you end up with huge inefficiencies in your system. And inefficiencies prevent the system from working well for the people using it.
It’s really important to consider the variability of different people’s travel patterns and where they might park and where charging stations can be installed, and overall, one can design infrastructure to save people time, which ultimately would allow more people to adopt electric vehicles if they want to.
We also do a lot of work on comparing the costs and the emissions of different vehicle options, and then just generally in the transportation space, there’s a lot of questions at the intersection of technology, performance, and behavior. How good are technologies today, how much might they improve, how can we improve them, and then how does that fit in with people’s behaviors and what people want. So this research spans engineering and human behavior.
AW: How do you keep track of all these people using electric vehicles?
JT: We study not just the electric vehicle owners of today, but also people who may be electric vehicle owners in the future. The people that have already adopted electric vehicles in this country have primarily been wealthier individuals — they may be more likely to have off street parking spots, be able to install chargers at home, and have more than one car. And all of that is not really a model for a future equitable transition to sustainable transportation. It’s really important that the data covers the populations overall, not just early electric vehicle adopters.
We draw on a number of different datasets, and part of the modeling is to develop ways to match information across these datasets, so you can probabilistically match detailed data on a given trip with a less detailed but broader dataset covering an entire population that looks at how many trips they take per day, and their start times and end times and so on. We’ve worked mostly with publicly available data at various resolutions. And we’ve also done some data collection ourselves.
AW: I bet what you find from these models is very different depending on where you’re looking, right?
JT: There are differences, but there are some ways in which the results were more similar across urban and rural areas, and across different cities, than we expected. One of those results was from a paper we published back in 2016. We asked what percentage of vehicles on the road could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle without having to recharge during the day.
We looked across the entire country, and the answers weren’t as different as you might expect. It doesn’t mean that the cities are the same — some cities are much more car dependent than others. But when people do drive, there’s a certain similarity in the energy use. And our results indicated that across many different kinds of cities, there was a much larger adoption potential than one might have expected. Even at that time, close to 90% of vehicles could be replaced with these low-cost electric vehicles even if they could only charge overnight.
AW: What are some key areas in the coming years where you think we need to devote a lot of thought?
JT: Finding out what people want from climate solutions and what fits in with their lifestyles is what’s crucial. Many people do want to address climate change. There are many different opinions on how to do that and how urgent it is, but overall, people do want solutions, and many of these solutions provide other benefits, like cleaner air or more convenience. But it’s important to understand people’s varying preferences and to develop solutions that account for them.
One other thing I want to say is if we’re talking about reducing emissions from transportation, this is a very substantial change: It’s going to require a lot of investment. In this country and a number of others, we need to look at the challenges people face in accessing transportation resources. There are many people who don’t have access at all to a high-quality transportation service. And any time you’re talking about this major transition, those issues really need to be addressed, because this is going to require such substantial change and investment. I just think we have to remember that transportation is really about providing a service, and right now that service is unevenly available to people. That needs to be a central part of this overall effort.
AW: Could you tell me about the other research you do?
JT: I work across all different energy services, and I look at these questions about how to be deliberate about developing and investing in green technologies. That work involves developing both data-driven models and mechanistic models. And we’re working across industrial energy services, electricity, transportation, and heating, so we’re not just focused on one energy service. Some of the work I do is look at how technologies change over time — the rates of change, the drivers of that change.
AW: Could you give an example of these models?
JT: We have something we’ve developed called the Sustainable Energy Systems Model that allows us to look at the electric power system. We use a cost minimization framework to ask the question, if you want to minimize the overall cost of electricity and incorporate renewables, but also reduce emissions and also provide a high-quality service, how much solar and wind capacity might you want, how much storage, and can those options be complemented by other sources of power?
One question of particular interest is the role of hydrogen fuel and the different cost drivers for producing it. We are interested in how to reduce the cost of green hydrogen.
