CHICAGO, Ill. — University of Illinois Board of Trustees Chairman Lawrence C. Eppley announced today that the Urbana-Champaign campus has received three grants totaling $4.025 million from the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation.

It was also announced at the meeting that sustainability offices will be established on the Urbana-Champaign and Springfield campuses to coordinate administration and student efforts to encourage energy conservation, promote environmentally friendly practices and integrate green thinking into the campuses' curricula, research and extracurricular activities. The University of Illinois at Chicago established a sustainability office in January.

The energy foundation grants will provide $1.2 million for lighting upgrades; $2 million for a wind turbine project and $825,000 for a bioenergy research project.

Chancellor Richard Herman said the grants are appropriate to the needs and character of the Urbana campus.

"The Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation grants will advance our efforts to implement cutting-edge energy conservation solutions,” Herman said. “The impact of this partnership will benefit the campus, the community and the people of Illinois. We are grateful to the foundation for its leadership role in creating a sustainable future."

U of I President B. Joseph White said the grants will be put to good use and fit in well with the University system’s energy policy and the continuing work of the three campuses’ energy task forces.

“These grants continue a history of the clean energy foundation’s assistance to the University in becoming more energy efficient and creating the energy solutions of the future,” White said. “The budgetary efficiencies these grants provide will allow us to apply more funds — every semester — on our academic front lines in support of our students and professors.

“Longer term, the grants’ research components will help us progress to our goal of campus sustainability and do the research to provide new, clean technologies to the marketplace,” White said.

The Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation was founded in 1999 as an independent foundation with a $225 million endowment from funds provided by Commonwealth Edison. The foundation awards grants to fund energy-conserving and money-saving facility improvements for local governments, non-profit organizations, schools and universities.

Over the last seven years, the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation has awarded $138 million in grants in the state’s 102 counties. During this period, the foundation has funded a lighting retrofit project and a geothermal heating and cooling system at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a lighting retrofit project at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Chairman Eppley gave U of I students credit for promoting energy efficiency and clean technologies on campus.

“The students on the Urbana campus have voted to have an energy-technologies fee to support alternative-energy production,” Eppley said. “Their concerns and idealism dovetail well with the administration and trustees’ efforts to control energy costs and set an environmental example for the state.

“The clean energy foundation’s grants enable us to work together on all aspects of our campus energy challenges – cost effectiveness, reduction of emissions and clean-energy research,” Eppley said.

Funds from the student-approved alternative-technology fee will contribute $300,000 to the wind turbine project, which will both replace conventionally produced electric power on campus and be used in research endeavors on optimum turbine placement, wind velocity, electrical generation and other data.

The University will contribute $1,075,000 in matching funds to the biomass research project. It will investigate generating heat and electricity by burning perennial grasses such as Miscanthus and crop wastes.

White said the sustainability offices will be in place on each campus by fall semester to coordinate both university and student organizations’ efforts at improving energy efficiency and conservation, acquisition of more environmentally friendly products and foods, the reuse and recycling of wastes, and the adoption of ecological practices that lower carbon emissions.

Area legislators, who were among those in the Illinois General Assembly that originally set up the Illinois Clean Energy Foundation, cheered the grants.

The decision to award these grants to the university is wonderful news in our effort to make the Champaign-Urbana an environmental leader in the state,” said State Representative Naomi Jakobsson.

“I applaud the Illinois Clean Energy Community Foundation for their work, and I commend the University of Illinois for their commitment to reducing energy consumption,” she said.

Sen. Michael Frerichs focused on the benefits to the state of clean energy research.

"I am very excited that the University of Illinois will be receiving this funding to promote clean energy,” Frerichs said. “President White and I agree that research in clean and alternative energy should be a mission of the University of Illinois. Our state should take the lead in creating jobs by growing the green economy."