If St. Thomas community members thought that the eventual completion of the Lee and Penny Anderson Arena would mean an end to South Campus construction, they have another thing coming.
University STEM departments have been working with the facilities management department for over a year on plans to demolish the greenhouse and medicinal garden attached to Owens Science Hall and construct a new Center for Microgrid Research in the space, according to St. Thomas director of construction John Silva.
The new facility will expand already-booming growth in the university’s microgrid studies, though greenhouse advocates will not come away empty-handed, either.
“It will not just be: deduct a greenhouse and add a microgrid. Essentially, we will be bringing back a brand-new greenhouse for biology,” Silva said.
The new, two-story structure will contain a new greenhouse built from scratch on the roof of the new microgrid facilities, plus an indoor lab, an office and storage space attached to the second floor of OWS. The new greenhouse will be built by Albert J. Lauer, Inc., the same company behind the university’s two current greenhouses, Grant said. Meanwhile, the rest of the structure will be done by Ryan Companies, whose teams Silva said will see overlap as they also finish construction on the arena.
The beginning of construction is still pending the city’s approval of its site plans, as well as the finalization of its Environmental Assessment Worksheet — the same cumulative EAW that the university resubmitted as part of its ongoing dispute involving the arena, according to Silva. Construction aims to be complete by the end of summer 2025.
Biology uses greenhouse loss for new growth
Greenhouse manager Catherine Grant has a mantra that helps rationalize the change:
“In this world, you adapt or die,” Grant said. “So I had to adapt to this reality, and it was very hard to swallow because I love that greenhouse… But I did and have moved on and tried to contribute to making a new space that will be maybe better or upgraded.”
If not better, then upgraded is at least an apt description of the new greenhouse space.
Many of the new features will help reduce the energy needed to run the greenhouse — such as double-pane acrylic panels in the place of glass and an automated shade system, both of which will retain heat better than the prior structure.
On top of this, the old greenhouse’s system of evaporative cooling — where outside air is passed through wet pads that cool it — had been unusable for years because of construction on the Schoenecker Center and the Anderson Arena, Grant said.
“That greenhouse is a giant intake fan; all the dust that’s generated by the demolition and every time a truck drives by, it’s terrible,” Grant said. “And I didn’t want those pads to get coated with the dust.”
The solution for the new greenhouse was to add four unit coolers that utilize high pressure to force hot air out vertically, a change that Grant said would allow her to make the space 8 to 10 degrees colder than outside temperatures.
New LED bulbs will also light the space without diminishing in light quality, a problem the old High-Intensity Discharge bulbs presented to growers.
The current greenhouse’s control system, a Wadsworth 1997 StepSaver system, is also set to be updated. Where the old system forced researchers to punch in commands manually and take photos of a tiny screen with their smartphone, Grant said that she will now be able to use that same phone to view many more different types of data remotely.
“There’s a bunch of different sensors that I don’t even know about yet,” Grant said. “So that will be really cool; that’s kind of like the pièce de resistance, like that’s the big thing.”
Being on the second floor also means being closer to the biology department, which Grant said will make bringing classes into the space more convenient.
The improvements aren’t enough to outweigh the losses for everyone, though. 2024 graduate Carmela King worked primarily in the Owens greenhouse for over two years, a place that she called “very special.”
While she said she is hopeful that the new space will retain the magic of the original, King’s fond memories of doing summer research with bumblebees and escaping from the stress of finals to “play with dirt” during the hectic time before the late-season plant sale will be hard to recapture.
Particularly hard to swallow for both King and Grant is the loss of the medicinal garden located next to the greenhouse. Grant said that plans are in the works to embed a new garden in front of the Center for Well-Being, which was budgeted for in the microgrid project plans.
Still, King said that it’s disappointing to know that the birds and animals she fed in the original garden would be left behind.
“I had squirrels and bunnies and chipmunks that I would feed on a daily basis and just a whole pile of bees that would come, which is so lovely to see on a campus that kind of preaches about sustainability and stuff like that,” King said. “So hearing that that is being taken away was quite disappointing.”
New center to supercharge microgrid growth
Microgrid researchers will have to prepare for a geographical shift as well, though, as the new space will work in conjunction with the center’s existing headquarters on the third floor of the Facilities and Design Center.
While Center Director Mahmoud Kabalan said that plans for the new space have been in the works for almost three years, settling on the greenhouse location was a separate process — one that began by reaching out to the biology department and working with them to address concerns.
“Thankfully, they were very receptive to it,” Kabalan said. “So we were very grateful that they worked with us.”
The center has been in a constant state of growth ever since it got up and running in 2017, according to Kabalan. What began with solar batteries and a diesel generator in the basement of the FDC quickly expanded to include amplifiers and advanced prototyping infrastructure.
These additions, he said, made the center a sophisticated means of emulating real-world scenarios — much bigger than a collection of commercial hardware in a basement.
The state of Minnesota funded the expansion in conjunction with Xcel Energy. Kabalan also thanked Rep. Betty McCollum of Minnesota’s Fourth District, whose advocacy for the center allowed it to secure funding from the Army Corps of Engineers.
With big money comes more big changes: Kabalan said the construction of the new center will allow the microgrid to connect nine buildings on South Campus rather than just to its dedicated substation at Xcel. These will include the Schoenecker Center, OWS, O’Shaughnessy Science Hall, the Facilities and Design Center, Anderson Parking Facility, the Anderson Arena, the School of Divinity, Binz Refectory and Brady Education Center.
Connection to the microgrid has the potential to decrease electricity costs for the university as well as to keep the lights on in case the main grid fails, according to Kabalan. Similar connections to North Campus would prove more convoluted to implement, he said, due to local regulations and issues of liability.
To power the undertaking, the new facility will include the latest and greatest technology for its clean generators, switchgear and energy storage.
Some energy storage equipment will be outside, in addition to what Kabalan compares to an equipment yard that will store other gear. An additional story-high, L-shaped wall will be constructed parallel to Cretin Avenue to hide this equipment from street view, according to Silva.
Kabalan said the new equipment will increase the center’s power output by a factor of about five, presenting researchers with operating conditions rarely seen at the university level. At the same time, it also presents the problem of learning how to master it.
“If we’re doing boring stuff and repetitive stuff, that means we’re not challenging ourselves enough, right?” Kabalan said. “So it’s going to be a very big jump; there’s going to be a learning curve for everyone here on campus, including our partners at the facilities department, too.”
While the microgrid and its electrical utility may be the operation’s “crown jewel,” Kabalan said that it’s the existence of the center itself and the educational opportunities it presents that sets St. Thomas’ work in the field apart.
“It’s a very different thing to say to a student that, ‘Oh look, we’re going to move through the theory, we’re gonna solve a homework, blah blah blah,’ than to say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re gonna do the theory and the homework, and guess what: the same stuff is in the basement, let’s go see,’” Kabalan said.
Sophomore electrical engineering student Sophia Pung said she appreciates the way that her research mirrors real-world microgrid work.
She said the center’s more fluid requirements and emphasis on personal responsibility line up more with the conditions of the internship she did at Indeed.com two summers ago than a typical classroom experience.
“It’s totally up to you to make it happen, and there’s no one that’s going to give you a bad grade or tell you like, ‘Oh, you didn’t turn in your assignment,’” Pung said. “It’s very much just like, ‘Do you want to do this? Do you want to build this thing? Then it’s up to you to build the thing.’”
Much like the work its student researchers are doing, the center has been constantly evolving, and walking around the Microgrid Research Center’s hub on the third floor of the Facilities and Design Center, it’s not hard to imagine where the money has gone.
Pung said that new faculty offices are a recent addition, as is a new meeting space outfitted with desks, monitors and large, glossy TVs. Some of the towering electrical equipment in the center, she said, was just delivered within the last week.
“I don’t think people would want to fund something that’s not actually making progress,” Pung said. “ … This technology, I think, is becoming more and more critical and applicable to the real world today.”
Kevin Lynch can be reached at lync1832@stthomas.edu.