Arrowhead Electric has doubled its space with its $2.5 million project and expects to reduce its overall energy costs.   7/1/2008 by Wayne Nelson

(Photo: Arrowhead Electric celebrated its expansion with a June 21 open house.)

In 2004, Arrowhead Electric Cooperative serving rural Cook County sold its DirecTV franchise for $2.5 million, not a bad return on its $50,000 upfront cost for getting into the satellite TV business a decade earlier.

The electric co-op used proceeds from that sale to finance its just-completed $2.5 million “green” expansion and rehab of its central office and distribution center along State Highway 61 at Lutsen. The 6,700 square-foot expansion has more than doubled its space there, said Don Stead, general manager.

“We were really cramped in the old building, and we had no truck bay next to the warehouse. Now we have space for the future,” he said.

The 300 square-feet of unused space will be available to house two or three more employees when the co-op is ready to add to its current workforce of 17 fulltime equivalent workers. Meanwhile, that space is available for tours and other special events, and it was used for the first time at Arrowhead Electric’s daylong June 21 open house for co-op members, employees and the general public.

They gathered to celebrate the first “green” building project in Cook County, one for which the co-op and its design-construction team are pursuing a “gold” LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) rating from the U.S. Green Building Council. Duluth-based Architecture Advantage, the design firm, and project general contractor Johnson Wilson Constructors, also Duluth-based, are leading that effort.

To date, the Duluth Clinic expansion on First Street, completed in 2006 is the only regional project awarded the “gold” LEED rating (between 39-51 points). The Life Science Building on the University of Minnesota Duluth campus won a “silver” rating, one step below (33-38). Whole Foods Co-op won a lower “certified” rating (26-32) for its East Fourth Street project in 2005.

No projects in Minnesota to date have won the highest “platinum” LEED rating (52-69).

The LEED rating program awards points for using energy saving technology, recycled and renewable materials and sourcing building products close to the project site.

Arrowhead Electric’s expansion has its share of those features: window design that maximizes day lighting (suppliers Heritage Windows and Doors and Superior Glass, both in Superior); cork flooring (Abalon’s , Superior); solar thermal roof panels for hot water heating; countertops made from recycled glass and concrete (St. Germain’s, Duluth); tongue-and-groove ceiling deck panels and interior door and window casing trim work produced from salvaged Douglas fir (Duluth Timber and Rob’s Custom Millwork, Superior); even labor saving insulated forms for pouring concrete walls to the roofline (Asdco, Duluth).

The Duluth office of Gausman & Moore, based in St. Paul, provided engineering services.

The most striking project design feature is a closed loop geothermal heating and cooling system that circulates water through a vertical polyethylene pipe system 300 feet into the ground. Subcontractor McKeever’s Well Drilling of nearby Schroeder drilled 12, 300-foot wells for that supplemental winter heating and summer cooling system, said John Beno, Johnson Wilson’s project manager. A water-to-water heat pump for in-floor heating and a smaller water-to-air pump for forced-air cooling power the system.

Stead said the co-op will monitor its energy savings.

Melissa Graftaas, Architecture Advantage’s project manager, said Arrowhead Electric will get an additional rating point for tracking those post-project energy savings for one year.

She said it is the design firm’s first LEED-eligible project, but the learning experience already has opened the door for its second “green” client, Minneapolis-based Tennant Co. Tennant has hired Architecture Advantage to guide LEED projects at its Minneapolis research and development center, and at a manufacturing site in Holland, MI.

“Arrowhead was the perfect client to work with,” she said.

“This has been a very rewarding project, and an exciting learning process for us. The (LEED) process hasn’t been as daunting as we expected, although the subcontractors have to be very careful in documenting their paperwork,” she said.

As general contractor, Johnson Wilson provided that documentation and hired subcontractors. In addition to those already mentioned with regional ties, were Stout Mechanical and Jamar Co. (roofing and siding), both in Duluth; Belknap Electric, Superior; and Edwin Thoreson (excavation), Grand Marais.

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