The modest facade of two 140 -year -old shop fronts in downtown Minneapolis hides a building on the latest state of clean energy technology.
The new headquarters of the McKnight Foundation in Washington Avenue is a fully decarbonized, 45,000 square meter building. The non -profit organization based in Minnesota is one of the largest philanthropic organizations in the country and every year offers millions of dollars of grants for environmental initiatives. When the foundation moved to a new headquarters this summer, it committed itself to retrofitting.
“It enables us to embody our mission,” Tonya Allen, President of the McKnight Foundation, told Sahan Journal.
According to Greiner Construction, a company based on the project in Minneapolis, it may be the first existing building in Minnesota that is operated without natural gas. This is a large milestone in Minnesota, where the environment generated by buildings is 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to a state report from 2025.
For a new construction project, it is relatively easy to achieve high energy efficiency standards, but McKnight wanted to prove that older buildings could also become green, said Allen.
“The most sustainable building is often the one that already exists,” said Ben Passer, director of the Midwest Climate and Energy program of the Midwest -Energy and Energy Program from McKNight.
Most buildings in Minnesota are driven with natural gas, which creates pollution. There are two primary alternatives to natural gas: electrical boilers, heat pumps and geothermal technology that uses energy from below the earth to regulate the temperature. McKnight used a third technique, thermal energy armor.
The tanks are basically massive thermosis behind the building. At night, the tanks create ice in the demand hours outside of the peak time, which is kept during the day during the day and released for cooling. In winter, the tanks store excess warmth and spread back into the building.
“It is a rather rare technology for a building of our size,” Passer told Sahan Journal.
McKnight wanted to show the technology that is used more often in the southwest could work in Minnesota. The foundation was also able to use the federal tax credits by the Inflation Reducation Act to receive $ 1.5 million for the project.
Laura Salveson, McKnight's facility director, said the retrofitting included the efforts to use materials that were redirected by landfills. The foundation worked with an organization, called Habitible to Quell -Recycling Materials with lower environmental impacts, she said.
Salveson and the Facility team went through the process to preserve the building certified by the US Green Building Council, which gave the room a gold ranking list for its Leed scale (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), the second highest number of points. This is a large upgrade for an office building that was created by combining two shop fronts from 1883 and 1890.
McKnight was inspired by the energy changes that two of her scholarship holders in Minneapolis made, all said. The Sabathani Community Center and the Minneapolis American Indian Center have undergone the latest energy efficiency transformations and are part of a Xcel Energy program and the City of Minneapolis Call Resilience Hubs. The idea is to create places with low CO2 footprints that can be a stable source of strength in their neighborhoods.
“We also wanted to be a stress center,” said Allen. “We wanted to choose a historic building and we wanted to be a place that could be an example of others.”
The former headquarters of the McKnight Foundation was nearby, and the organization wanted to stay in the city center, said Allen. The new room is larger, with large and small rooms to organize conferences and meetings. The foundation invites its scholarship holders to use the facility and has constant visitors. More than 2,000 guests have used the building since its opening in May.
“It was a busy space since we moved in,” said Salveson.
In 2023, the McKnight Foundation strengthened its donations for projects that are aimed at environmental initiatives. The organization has committed an additional 200 million US dollars for scholarships, and today around 32 million US dollars for climate and energy projects are financed in the middle west.
The government of President Donald Trump has withdrawn from many of these initiatives and created a larger gap for organizations such as McKnight. However, the organization sees many opportunities at the state level for climate work, said Allen, and the organization tries to focus on positive effects.
“At the moment the focus is locally,” said Allen.
People talk about climate change in different ways, based on their worldview, said Allen, but most recognize that extreme weather is more common today. They see the effects on their local infrastructure and agricultural harvest, she said. It is important to talk to people about how they see how the climate changes their world and use this as windows to find solutions.
“Let's focus on the most positive thing we can do,” she said.
This story was originally published by The journal thoroughly and distributed through a partnership with the Associated Press.