MN Energy Climate Corps Happenings!
By Emily Bakken, Minnesota Energy Climate Corps Crew Leader / AmeriCorps Member
Training! Training! And some more training! What I love most about the Corps is the ability to gain a lot of experience as young adults. All of us at the end of this program will have many technical skills and certifications!
Minnesota Energy Climate Corps has been busy welcoming new crew members who joined us this March. Before crew members joined, crew leads completed lots of training, including S-212 training. I got to see members from my service term in 2022 and fellow classmates from Duluth at S-212, which was fun to see them! I am really grateful for the Corps bringing a group of young people together. It is really nice to have people in a similar stage of life, the built-in community has been really great since a lot of us recently moved to Minneapolis.
I don’t think a lot of folks know exactly what Energy Climate Corps really does, so I want to use this post to talk about our training and what we do. A big training that is pretty crucial to the energy audits we perform is Building Science Principles (BSP). Both crew leaders and crew members went through a week-long course and took an exam to receive our BSP certification. The course highlighted building mechanics, building ventilation, what a conditioned building is, and so much more. Us crew leads have performed a sample energy audit at Whittier Recreation Center. Our primary project host is Minneapolis Parks and Rec. Board. We go in and perform an Ashrae level 2 audit. Ashrae stands for American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-Conditioning Engineers, in short it is an international society that focuses on building systems and energy efficiency. It is our standard and guideline for audits we perform.
After we perform an audit we send our data to ServeMN, where they write up a report of the data we collect and send it to the project host. What is unique about partnership with ServeMN is that they coded a data collection system called Knack, which is specialized to what we need to collect for an Ashrae audit. So what do we specifically collect? Think about anything that uses energy in a building, that is what we collect. We assess the energy loads in a building, examples being lighting, HVAC units, and the ventilation of a building. Essentially, I would view the energy audit we do as a non-intrusive assessment of buildings energy usage of midsize to large buildings. The main goal is to use our data to find energy savings in a building. The first step is getting the data so that is where our task lies!
We also will be doing some natural resource work to keep us busy in between audits! Training is coming to a close and I know everyone is so excited to get out in the field. Thank you so much for reading and I hope you know a little bit more about MN Energy Climate Corps!