Sabathani Community Center has served South Minneapolis since 1966. Housed in a former middle school building that is nearly a century old, the center provides programming, resources, and community space for the surrounding neighborhood, including youth development, health and wellness services, food access, senior programming, and workforce development. The building sits near George Floyd Square and anchors a neighborhood that has made community resilience, economic vitality, and cultural preservation central to its future.
For years, the building’s energy infrastructure was among the oldest and least efficient in Minneapolis. Its original boilers, affectionately known around the center as “Thelma and Louise,” had far exceeded their useful lifespan. The facility received a near-zero score on an EnergyStar audit, and the combination of aging heating systems, 104 individual air conditioning units, and a building envelope in need of improvement was driving significant energy costs and carbon emissions. Replacing that infrastructure was certainly a sustainability goal, but it was also a financial necessity that would allow more of Sabathani’s resources to go directly toward the programs and people it serves.
Sabathani’s Community Energy Project was developed with a vision to transform the building into a Community Resilience Hub: a facility capable of providing power, services, and shelter to the surrounding neighborhood during grid outages, extreme weather events, and other climate-related emergencies.
The full project combines geothermal heating and cooling with rooftop solar generation, battery backup storage, and microgrid technology, creating a system that can operate independently from the grid when conditions demand it. Darcy was selected to design and install the geothermal system, which replaces the building’s outdated boiler and cooling infrastructure with a three-well groundwater-enabled system sized to serve the main Sabathani building with capacity to expand to additional housing on the campus. Projections estimate annual energy cost savings of approximately $61,000 and a reduction of 550 metric tons of carbon emissions per year.
The project is also part of the broader 38th Street THRIVE Strategic Development Plan, a community-led initiative developed with the City of Minneapolis to preserve the area’s African American history, economic vitality, and access to living-wage jobs. The Community Energy Project is designed to create a living laboratory for geothermal, solar, and energy efficiency careers, with job training built into the program alongside the physical infrastructure.
The geothermal retrofit at Sabathani is being completed in phases while the building remains in active operation. Early construction milestones included the completion of three wells, the safe removal and recycling of the original boilers, and the advancement of interior mechanical work. Underground piping installation and rooftop solar and battery storage installation followed as subsequent phases of the project.
Funding for the project has been assembled from a wide range of partners, including the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, the McKnight Foundation, Xcel Energy, the Center for Energy and Environment, and state legislative support. The project is also part of the Xcel Energy Resilient Cities Minneapolis initiative, which selected Sabathani as one of three buildings for rooftop solar and large-scale battery storage installation.
The Sabathani Community Energy Project represents one of the more ambitious geothermal retrofits in the Darcy portfolio, both in scope and in what it means for the people the building serves. When complete, Sabathani will have gone from one of Minneapolis’s least energy-efficient buildings to a model of how older structures can be transformed into resilient, clean-energy assets that serve their communities for generations.
As Sabathani’s own leaders have put it, saving money on energy means more dollars available for the programs, services, and people that have made the center the heart of South Minneapolis for six decades and counting.
The Native American Community Clinic (NACC) has served the urban Native American community of the Twin Cities since 2003. As a Federally Qualified Health Center located along the American Indian Cultural Corridor on East Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis, NACC provides a full range of culturally centered healthcare services, including medical, behavioral health, dental, and substance use treatment, regardless of a patient’s ability to pay. The clinic currently serves more than 5,000 patients annually.
For years, NACC’s ambitions outpaced its facilities. The existing clinic building could not support the expanded services or patient volumes the community needed. The new development addresses that constraint directly by delivering a six-story, mixed-use building at 1213 East Franklin Avenue that brings a rebuilt, expanded 30,000-square-foot health center to the ground floor and 83 units of deeply affordable rental housing above it under the name Wihinaphe Apartments. Wihinaphe means “New Beginnings.”
With the expanded facility, NACC expects to serve an additional 3,000 patients per year. The housing, reserved for households earning between 30–60% of area median income, adds deeply affordable units to one of Minneapolis’s most significant cultural corridors. The project was developed by NACC and Wellington Management, with support from the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, UnitedHealth Group, the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, Minnesota Greenbank financing, and Xcel Energy rebates for the rooftop solar installation.
From the beginning, the project was designed to reach close to net-zero carbon emissions, which required combining geothermal heating and cooling with rooftop solar generation. For a building serving a community with acute health needs, the long-term operating cost stability of a geothermal system also carries practical importance, as lower and more predictable energy costs free up resources that can be directed toward care and services.
Darcy was selected to install the geothermal system. The groundwater-enabled approach was well-suited to the urban site on Franklin Avenue, where space for a conventional closed-loop wellfield does not exist. Two wells access the aquifer beneath the site, providing stable, efficient thermal energy year-round with a minimal above-grade footprint. The geothermal plant is integrated with the building’s mechanical systems across both the residential and clinic portions of the development.
The building is a six-story structure of poured concrete foundation and post-tensioned concrete for the lower levels, transitioning to wood-frame construction for the upper residential floors. The geothermal system is integrated into the building’s mechanical design to serve both the clinic and the residential units above, with the two-well Darcy system anchoring the thermal plant.
The project drew on Minnesota Greenbank financing through the Greater Minnesota Housing Fund, consistent with the approach used at The Heights development in St. Paul, helping to make the additional cost of geothermal and solar systems feasible within the development’s affordable housing financing structure. Xcel Energy also contributed energy upgrade rebates for the rooftop solar component.
The development groundbreaking took place in April 2025, and residents began moving into the Wihinaphe Apartments in September 2026.
The Native American Community Clinic and Wihinaphe Apartments represent what is possible when affordable housing, community healthcare, and sustainable building systems are designed together rather than treated as separate objectives. For NACC and the community it serves, the new campus is a long-term infrastructure investment in health, housing stability, and cultural continuity along the Franklin Avenue corridor.
For Darcy, this project reflects a core conviction that geothermal heating and cooling belongs in every kind of building, including those serving communities where the stakes of getting infrastructure right are highest.
The Tower View Estate has been a place of creative and intellectual pursuit for more than a century. Built between 1915 and 1921 by botanist Alexander Pierce Anderson, whose research on puffed grain helped transform the American food industry, the expansive 350-acre property on the western edge of Red Wing became a hub of innovation, experimentation, and community life. Its buildings, including the main residence, a landmark 100-foot water tower, laboratories, greenhouse, and barn, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
In 1995, the Anderson Center was established on the Tower View Estate to continue that legacy of creativity and community engagement. Over the past three decades, the organization has painstakingly restored and adapted the historic buildings into a working campus for artists, scholars, and the public. Today, the estate includes 22 active studio spaces, three galleries, a renovated barn serving as a performance and event venue, 15 acres of sculpture gardens, and the historic main residence that houses visiting artists-in-residence. The artist residency program, one of the largest of its kind in the Upper Midwest, has hosted more than 900 artists from 45 states and 40 countries since opening.
The Anderson Center has received four major preservation awards for its stewardship of the Tower View Estate, including the 2000 Preservation Award from the Preservation Alliance of Minnesota. Maintaining this campus, both its physical integrity and its operational sustainability, is an ongoing commitment.
Stewardship is central to everything the Anderson Center does, including stewardship of the historic buildings, the natural landscape, and the organization’s long-term financial health. Choosing a heating and cooling system for a campus of this scale and complexity required a solution that could perform reliably across multiple historic structures while minimizing environmental impact and long-term operating costs.
Darcy’s groundwater geothermal approach was well suited to the site. The expansive Tower View property provided the space and geological conditions needed to support a high-capacity single-well system, and the compact wellhead footprint meant minimal disruption to the campus’s historic grounds and sculpture gardens. A single 12-inch well delivers 341 MBH of heating capacity and 85 tons of cooling for the facility, making it one of the higher-capacity single-well installations in the Darcy portfolio.
The geothermal system was drilled and developed by Bergerson Caswell, with Ryan Mechanical serving as the mechanical contractor. Together with Darcy Solutions’ geology and design teams, the project partners worked to deliver a system appropriate to the scale and character of the Tower View campus.
The Anderson Center’s commitment to the Tower View Estate has always been about ensuring the campus can continue to serve artists, students, and the broader Red Wing community for generations to come. A geothermal system that reduces dependence on fossil fuels, lowers operating costs, and requires minimal above-ground infrastructure is a natural fit for an organization that has spent 30 years proving that historic buildings and forward-thinking stewardship are fully compatible.
Darcy delivers its largest project to date: a 12-well, 2,150-ton groundwater geothermal system powering a 320,000-square-foot utility service center at The Heights development on St. Paul’s East Side — built to run without fossil fuels from day one.
In November 2024, Xcel Energy broke ground on a new service center designed to anchor The Heights, a multi-use development on St. Paul’s East Side built on the site of the former Hillcrest Golf Course. The 320,000-square-foot facility is roughly twice the size of the company’s previous Rice Street location, which had served the region for more than a century.
The service center will house field crews, dispatchers, and design teams supporting Xcel Energy’s gas and electric distribution across the Twin Cities metro, along with fabrication shops, warehousing, fleet maintenance facilities, and office space. The site is designed to support 375 jobs at opening, with capacity to grow to 500.
Developed in collaboration with the Saint Paul Port Authority, The Heights aims to become one of the first net-zero communities in the country, targeting Platinum LEED for Communities certification. The service center’s design reflects that ambition at every level, from energy systems to employee wellness.
From the earliest stages of design, the service center was planned to meet LEED Silver (v4.1) certification and Minnesota Energy Code (ASHRAE 90.1-2019) requirements. Xcel Energy’s broader commitments set the bar higher still: reducing carbon emissions 80% by 2030 and achieving 100% carbon-free electricity by 2050.
Darcy was selected to deliver a geothermal system that could meet those goals at the scale this facility demands. By using groundwater-enabled geothermal heating and cooling, the building operates entirely without fossil fuels for thermal comfort — across both office spaces and the service fleet environment. The Darcy system integrates naturally alongside the rooftop solar array and high-efficiency mechanical systems, creating a cohesive clean energy strategy rather than a patchwork of independent upgrades.
At the time construction began, the Xcel Energy St. Paul Service Center was Darcy’s largest project ever completed, featuring a 12-well system spanning the full site. The scope required precise coordination across multiple construction teams and site conditions.
Two of the 12 wells were installed directly adjacent to three electric vehicle charging stations, a configuration that required close collaboration between the geothermal installation crew and the broader project team to sequence the work without compromising either system. During installation, Darcy’s geology and design teams also encountered an unexpected geologic anomaly beneath the site. Custom design solutions were developed and implemented without delaying construction milestones, reflecting the technical depth Darcy brings to complex, high-stakes projects.
Since commissioning, the system has performed as designed, operating efficiently and reliably to support round-the-clock utility operations across a facility that never stops running.
The Xcel Energy St. Paul Service Center is as much an investment in people as it is in infrastructure. Beyond the geothermal system, the facility includes indoor air quality monitoring, bike storage, access to trails on bee-friendly lawns, bird-friendly glass, and 23 electric vehicle charging stations to support the company’s growing fleet. One megawatt of rooftop solar rounds out an energy strategy designed for the long term.
For the surrounding community, the facility is a resilience asset. When outages or disruptions occur, this is the hub that keeps crews mobilized and customers reconnected. By pairing that mission-critical reliability with a fossil-fuel-free energy system, Xcel Energy and Darcy have built something that delivers on operational, environmental, and community values at the same time.
Simpson Housing Services has provided emergency shelter and supportive services in South Minneapolis for more than 40 years. For much of that time, the organization operated out of the former Simpson United Methodist Church at 2740 First Avenue South, a 141-year-old building that had served as an emergency shelter for four decades. As the need for services grew and the building aged, Simpson and its development partner Project for Pride in Living recognized an opportunity to replace the aging structure with a modern, dignified facility designed from the ground up to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness.
Demolition of the former church began in fall 2023, and the project broke ground on June 12, 2024. The new Simpson Community Shelter and Apartments includes 72 shelter beds and 42 units of deeply affordable housing, along with a commercial kitchen, a clinic space for Health Care for the Homeless, and extensive on-site services. The upper floors, owned and operated by Project for Pride in Living, provide permanent supportive housing apartments, with 30 units specifically designated for people experiencing chronic homelessness in Hennepin County. General contractors Watson-Forsberg and TRI-Construction built the project, with LHB serving as architect.
The facility welcomed its first shelter guests in January 2026, completing a years-long effort by Simpson, PPL, and a wide network of public and private partners to replace one of Minneapolis’s most important community assets with a facility fit for the next generation of service.
For a facility serving people who are experiencing homelessness or working toward stable housing, long-term operational affordability is central to the mission. Lower and more predictable energy costs directly support the organizations’ ability to direct resources toward services rather than utility bills, and a mechanical system that is easy to operate and maintain reduces the ongoing burden on facility staff.
Darcy was selected to install the geothermal system at 2740 First Avenue. The urban site in the Whittier neighborhood presented constraints that ruled out conventional HVAC approaches. The building footprint and surrounding context left no room for a traditional closed-loop wellfield. Two Darcy groundwater wells deliver 183 tons of cooling capacity and 696 MBH of heating from a compact installation that fits seamlessly within the built environment of the development and provides straightforward access for long-term operations and maintenance.
The geothermal system was integrated into the new construction of the five-story building, with the two-well installation sited to minimize disruption to the surrounding neighborhood while remaining accessible for ongoing system management. The system serves the full building, providing consistent, efficient climate control across both the shelter floors and the permanent supportive housing units above.
The broader project was financed through a coalition of partners including JPMorganChase Community Development Banking, the City of Minneapolis, Hennepin County, the State of Minnesota, and numerous private and philanthropic contributors, reflecting the scale of community investment that made the project possible.
The Simpson Community Shelter and Apartments represent a new model for what emergency and transitional housing infrastructure can look like, where comfort, dignity, and long-term operational sustainability are built in from the start rather than treated as luxuries. By choosing groundwater geothermal for a facility of this purpose and scale, Simpson Housing Services and Project for Pride in Living made a decision that will benefit the people who live and work in the building for decades to come.
Project for Pride in Living has been building affordable housing and economic opportunity in the Twin Cities for more than 50 years. Opportunity Crossing, located at 3030 Nicollet Avenue in South Minneapolis, represents PPL’s largest investment to date: a six-story, mixed-use development offering 110 units of affordable housing alongside ground-floor commercial spaces designed for local entrepreneurship and a redesigned Wells Fargo branch.
The development serves residents earning up to 50% of the Minneapolis area median income, with studio through four-bedroom units available and 12 homes specifically set aside for adults exiting homelessness. Beyond housing, Opportunity Crossing was designed as a community hub, with a community room, playground, underground parking, and coworking spaces. The commercial ground floor was structured so that local entrepreneurs own rather than rent their spaces, creating a pathway to long-term economic stability alongside the housing it provides.
The building opened with a ribbon cutting on July 9, 2026, bringing together residents, project partners, community and civic leaders, and elected officials to celebrate what PPL President and CEO Karla Henderson described as an example for the nation of how to build projects by, with, and for community.
Opportunity Crossing was designed from the start with sustainability as a core component. The project brought together more than 30 funding partners and approached green building elements as integral to the development’s long-term value for residents and the neighborhood.
The site at 3030 Nicollet presented a meaningful constraint given its dense urban footprint with limited space for conventional HVAC infrastructure. A traditional closed-loop geothermal system would have required far more land than the site could accommodate. Darcy’s groundwater-enabled approach resolved that challenge directly. Two wells access the aquifer beneath the site, delivering full heating and cooling capacity for the 110-unit building from a compact above-grade footprint that left the construction site’s limited space available for the project’s other priorities.
Groundwater geothermal was the only realistic path to fully electrifying the HVAC system on a site of this density, and it provided PPL with a long-lived, low-operating-cost infrastructure investment that benefits residents through lower utility costs and a more stable thermal environment for years to come.
The Darcy system delivers 138 tons of cooling capacity and 1,464 MBH of heating through a two-well aquifer-based configuration, integrated into the building’s central mechanical system. The installation was coordinated within the broader construction activity of a six-story mixed-use building on a constrained South Minneapolis site, requiring precise sequencing and close coordination with the project’s general contractor, Weis Builders.
The project was designed by Design by Melo, with the building’s architecture reflecting community input gathered throughout the development process. The building also features a multi-story Afrofuturist mural created in partnership with Juxtaposition Arts, making the exterior of the building itself an expression of the neighborhood’s cultural identity.
Opportunity Crossing demonstrates that sustainable building systems and affordable housing are fully compatible, and that groundwater geothermal in particular can work within the kind of constrained urban sites where affordable housing most often gets built. By delivering high-efficiency heating and cooling from just two wells on a dense city block, the Darcy system gives PPL’s residents the long-term benefit of lower energy costs in a building designed to serve them for generations.
Pepper Construction has been one of the Midwest’s most prominent general contracting and construction management firms since its founding in Chicago in 1927. Today, the company ranks among the nation’s top contractors and operates across Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Wisconsin, with a client base that spans healthcare, K-12, higher education, senior living, commercial, and institutional projects. Illinois remains the company’s home state and largest center of operations, with its Barrington office at 411 Lake Zurich Road serving as a regional hub for project teams and administration supporting clients throughout the state and beyond.
Pepper’s core philosophy holds that building performance impacts human performance, and this belief shapes how the firm approaches sustainability across its own operations as much as in the facilities it builds for others. The Barrington office’s adoption of groundwater geothermal is an expression of that philosophy in the most direct way possible: a high-performance mechanical system installed in the building where Pepper’s own teams work every day.
For a company that routinely advises clients on high-performance building systems and sustainable construction strategies, choosing a conventional HVAC approach for its own facility would be a missed opportunity. Pepper’s Barrington office was identified as a strong candidate for a Darcy geothermal retrofit that could meaningfully reduce energy costs, demonstrate the technology’s real-world performance, and give Pepper’s teams direct experience with a system they can speak to credibly in client conversations.
The single-well Darcy system delivers 192 tons of cooling and 1,095 MBH heating from a compact installation along the roadway approach to the building, where the wellhead is intentionally visible. This was a deliberate choice that turns the geothermal system into a conversation piece for visitors and a tangible example of what Pepper practices as well as preaches.
The project also takes advantage of the Investment Tax Credit available through the Inflation Reduction Act, improving the financial case for the installation and providing a firsthand reference point for Pepper when advising clients on how to structure similar investments.
Drilling commenced in spring 2026 with system commissioning targeted for later in the year. The single groundwater well accesses the local aquifer to deliver stable, efficient thermal exchange for the building’s heating and cooling load, integrated with the facility’s existing mechanical infrastructure.
There is a particular kind of credibility that comes from installing in your own building the same systems you recommend to your clients. For Pepper Construction, the Barrington geothermal project is that credibility made concrete. When Pepper’s project managers, estimators, and sustainability specialists walk clients through the case for high-performance HVAC, they can now point to a working system in their own regional office as proof that the math works and the technology delivers.
For Darcy, the Pepper project marks a first project in a new state, delivered for a partner whose commitment to sustainable construction runs deep and whose network of clients spans exactly the kinds of buildings where groundwater geothermal belongs.
Founded in 1871, Lakewood Cemetery is one of Minneapolis’s most storied landmarks. Situated on 250 acres in southwest Minneapolis between Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska, the cemetery is the final resting place of more than 200,000 individuals, including governors, senators, business leaders, philanthropists, and celebrated artists. Among them are U.S. Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey and Senator Paul Wellstone. The cemetery welcomes more than 100,000 visitors each year and has long served as a place of quiet reflection, cultural memory, and community connection in the heart of the city.
For much of its history, Lakewood lacked a dedicated facility to welcome visitors, host community events, and serve families making memorial arrangements in a space designed for that purpose. Planning for a new Welcome Center began as the cemetery marked its 150th anniversary, with a vision that went beyond a functional office building. The new center was designed to serve as a community hub, an educational venue, a place for events and programming, and a model of environmental responsibility befitting an institution that thinks in generations.
Ground broke in August 2022. The project was completed in March 2024, with a ribbon cutting and public grand opening celebrated in May of that year. The two-story, 25,000-square-foot building sits at the entrance of the cemetery at West 36th Street and Hennepin Avenue, designed by Snow Kreilich Architects in collaboration with Miller Dunwiddie and Ten x Ten Landscape Architecture, with JE Dunn Construction as construction manager and MBJ Engineering providing structural solutions.
From the start, Lakewood Cemetery leadership was clear about their sustainability ambitions and their desire to demonstrate environmental stewardship. The Welcome Center was designed to achieve net-zero energy ready status, meaning it was built to produce as much energy as it consumes over the course of a year through the combination of a high-performance building envelope, rooftop solar, and a high-efficiency geothermal mechanical system. Darcy’s two-well groundwater system was selected as the thermal cornerstone of that strategy.
“Geothermal, as part of a net-zero energy building, is part of a broader sustainability strategy that includes preserving our urban tree canopy and moving toward more sustainable landscaping,” said Lakewood President Chris Makowske. “The design teams we worked with recommended geothermal, among other strategies, to help us achieve the net-zero energy goal for the building.”
The compact Darcy well configuration also preserved ground space for future memorialization, addressing a constraint unique to the cemetery context. A conventional geothermal wellfield would have consumed a much larger footprint across Lakewood’s grounds, limiting future options for the families the cemetery serves.
“Using the Darcy well system also helped us preserve precious space that can be used for memorialization in the future,” Makowske said. “Traditional wells would have taken up a much broader field and limited future memorialization options for those we serve.”
The project is also taking advantage of the Federal Renewable Energy Tax Credit available through the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, improving the long-term financial case for the installation.
The two 12-inch diameter wells are integrated with a central heat pump system to provide consistent thermal comfort throughout the building across all seasons. The system works in tandem with the building’s rooftop solar array and high-performance envelope to carry the Welcome Center toward its net-zero energy certification.
Seven acres of sitework and landscaping improvements accompanied the building construction, including new garden areas, a half-mile walking trail, and an elliptical bog garden with a tamarack planting that connects the building to the cemetery’s natural landscape. Construction was carefully phased around ongoing cemetery operations and community events throughout the build, minimizing disruption to the families and visitors the cemetery serves year-round.
Lakewood Cemetery has always operated with a long time horizon in mind. An institution that has served the Minneapolis community for more than 150 years and plans to do so for generations more approaches every major decision with durability, stewardship, and long-term value as the primary measures of success.
The Welcome Center embodies those values. Sustainable by design, welcoming by purpose, and built to serve the living as much as to honor those who have passed, it reflects what Makowske described as a desire to change the narrative around what a cemetery can be.
“We want a place like Lakewood to be able to do that — to be a place of remembrance,” Makowske said.
For Darcy, the Lakewood project is a reminder that geothermal belongs in every kind of building, including the ones that ask the most profound questions about time, legacy, and what it means to care for a place.
Renewable Energy Partners was founded by Jamez Staples, a North Minneapolis native and solar entrepreneur who recognized early on that the clean energy economy was leaving behind the communities that stood to benefit from it most. In 2017, Staples purchased a 22,000-square-foot former state workforce center at 1200 Plymouth Avenue North, with a vision to turn it into an accessible, community-rooted hub for clean energy workforce training.
That vision became reality over the following years through a network of public and private partnerships, including $2.5 million in state funding from the Minnesota Legislature’s Commerce and Energy Conference Committee. Today the Regional Apprenticeship Training Center offers training in solar installation, HVAC, and other clean energy disciplines, with courses designed specifically to bring residents of North Minneapolis and other historically underserved communities into careers in the growing clean energy sector. Programs are structured to remove barriers to access, including paid attendance and transportation support for students.
The facility hosts multiple partners and tenants alongside REP’s own programs, including Minneapolis Climate Action, CenterPoint Energy, Avivo, and Minnesota STEM Partnership, making it a genuine hub for clean energy education and community development in North Minneapolis.
For a building dedicated to demonstrating what the clean energy economy can look like, the HVAC system was an obvious opportunity to put that mission into practice. REP’s retrofit goals included eliminating fossil fuels from the building’s energy systems, maximizing efficiency, and creating a real-world example of integrated geothermal, solar, and storage technology that students and visitors could see operating in the building around them.
Darcy was selected to design and install the geothermal component of the retrofit. The site presented a constraint common to urban buildings, in that it had limited space for a conventional wellfield. After evaluating the site’s boundaries, a single Darcy well installed in the western portion of the parking lot proved sufficient to deliver the full heating and cooling capacity the building required. The compact single-well footprint preserved the facility’s parking and left no above-grade disruption to the building’s street presence on Plymouth Avenue.
The system also took advantage of the Investment Tax Credit available through the Inflation Reduction Act, meaningfully improving the financial case for the installation.
The 2022 retrofit went well beyond the geothermal installation. Building equipment and temperature controls were significantly updated throughout to modernize operations and support the integrated energy system. The geothermal plant works in tandem with the rooftop solar array and battery storage system, creating a building that generates, stores, and distributes clean energy from multiple sources in coordination.
The result is a facility that functions as both a training environment and a live demonstration project. Students learning HVAC, solar installation, and energy systems work alongside and within the very systems they are being trained on, giving the learning environment an immediacy and authenticity that a conventional building could not offer.
The REP training center and the Pipefitters Local 455 Apprenticeship Training Center in St. Paul represent something meaningful in the Darcy portfolio. Both geothermal systems were installed specifically because the people who build, maintain, and teach about these technologies wanted to work in buildings that run on them. At 1200 Plymouth Avenue, the geothermal system has become both a mechanical upgrade and a key part of the educational infrastructure, a daily demonstration that clean energy systems work, that they are accessible, and that the careers built around them are real and available to anyone willing to learn.
Steamfitters and Pipefitters Local 455 has represented skilled trades workers in St. Paul and central Minnesota since 1904. The union represents more than 1,500 certified steamfitters and pipefitters across a 22-county jurisdiction, and its 100,000-square-foot apprenticeship training and certification center on L’Orient Street serves as both a working union hall and a hands-on learning environment for apprentices working through the union’s five-year training program.
The center is where Local 455 prepares the next generation of workers for a rapidly changing energy landscape that increasingly requires expertise in clean energy systems, including geothermal. For an organization whose members install and maintain exactly these kinds of systems, the training center itself is a powerful statement about the trades’ commitment to sustainable infrastructure.
In late 2018, Local 455 began evaluating options to retrofit the training center’s HVAC system. The primary goals were to maximize energy efficiency, eliminate aging rooftop units, free the roof for a solar array, and keep the project aligned with the union’s broader interest in promoting clean energy work for pipefitters and steamfitters.
A conventional geothermal system was considered, but it would have required approximately 70 wells and significant disruption to the facility’s parking lot. Instead, Darcy offered four eight-inch diameter wells (three bedrock and one surficial) installed along the eastern perimeter of the parking lot to deliver the full thermal capacity the building required, with a footprint that left parking intact and the roof clear for solar panels.
“We were looking to promote clean-energy projects that pipefitters and steamfitters work on, so we decided to put a geothermal energy system into our training center and showcase it,” said Local 455 Business Manager Tony Poole. “It’s good for reducing greenhouse gases and emissions, but it’s also good to promote the work we do in the clean-energy field.”
This project represents the first commercial Darcy geothermal installation ever completed. The 4-well system accesses the aquifer beneath the site, circulating groundwater at a consistent 52 degrees through a hydraulic cooling system that distributes thermal energy to chilled beam units throughout the building. The chilled beam configuration was a deliberate design choice that eliminates the energy overhead of forced air distribution while giving apprentices direct exposure to a system type they are increasingly likely to encounter on the job.
The project also took advantage of the Investment Tax Credit available through the Inflation Reduction Act, a financial benefit that the union’s real estate partner helped secure and that meaningfully improved the economics of the installation.
Since commissioning, the system has run reliably across multiple cooling seasons. An Xcel Energy analysis found that even while operating at limited capacity during an early mechanical tuning period, the system reduced cooling costs by 85% compared to the previous infrastructure.
Since installation, the Local 455 training center has become one of Darcy’s most visited project sites, regularly hosting educational tours for local news organizations, policymakers, and others interested in what commercial geothermal looks like in practice.
For Local 455’s apprentices, it is a working system they can observe, study, and learn from every day they are in the building.
“The Darcy Solutions system is very energy-efficient; we have been using it for multiple years for cooling the entire facility,” said Jeremy McConkey, Training Director at UA Local 455 JATC. “It’s easy to operate and an excellent way to show the skills to build new energy systems we train our teams on every day.”
