Tessa Haagenson’s achievements since her days at Bemidji State earned her recognition this past June as a “Top 50 EcoLeader” by the National Wildlife Foundation.

Haagenson has been leading efforts to educate people on climate change and renewable energy since her days as an NWF 2005-06 Campus Ecology Fellow at BSU where, as a student senator, she helped institute a student fee to support wind energy.

A love of nature instilled by her parents guided her toward environmental studies, she said, and the university’s faculty encouraged her career goals.

“I certainly had support when I was at Bemidji State from professors who helped me learn what I needed to — and wanted to — at the time when I thought I may be going into energy policy,” Haagenson said.

She is now principal planning analyst at Great River Energy in Maple Grove, she runs a resource-forecasting model that helps guide Great River Energy’s long-term resource decisions and tracks renewable energy standard obligations.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree in environmental studies program with an emphasis in policy and planning in 2017, Haagenson spent a semester in Denmark as a guest graduate student in sustainable energy planning and management at the University of Aalborg.

Recognizing her need for a greater understanding of the electrical power grid, she then earned a second bachelor’s degree — in electrical engineering — from the University of North Dakota, and this year she expects to complete a graduate certificate in solar engineering from the Penn State World Campus.

Haagenson said everyone should gain some knowledge of how electrical power systems work.

“For students who want to make a difference for sustainability in the electric power industry — even if you’re coming at it from a non-technical angle — gain at least a cursory understanding of the way the electric power system works and the regulatory world that governs many aspects of it,” she said.