Building History and Use
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.
Why Geothermal?
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.”
Design and Construction
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.
A Living Training Ground
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.”