Workers install the geothermal hydronics tubing underneath a green at Karsten Creek Golf Club in Stillwater, Okla. Photo by Kyle Callahan
Crew members at Karsten in Stillwater, Okla., didn’t necessarily set out to be innovators in the world of golf course hydronics.
But when the decision was made to put $31 million into a wall-to-wall renovation of the acclaimed home of the Oklahoma State men’s and women’s golf teams and talk of hydronics first surfaced, it didn’t take long to figure out a way to move the relatively nascent technology forward and, at the same time, give a nod to OSU’s not-too-distant past.
When Karsten (formerly Karsten Creek Golf Club) reopens sometime in mid-May or early June after its 20-or-so-month reno, it will become what is believed to be the world’s first course to feature geothermal hydronics on all 23 of its greens.
“We didn’t see enough cons to not give it the green light,” says Kyle Callahan, Karsten’s GCSAA Class A superintendent and 21-year association member. “You know that old saying, ‘You never want to be the first, and you never want to be last’? Luckily, guys like Russ Myers taught us hydronics works. It’s been around longer than the hydronics.
“We just didn’t feel like we were taking that big of a risk. We may be wrong. But it just felt right.”
Myers did in fact bring hydronics — a subsurface, closed-loop system that circulates a liquid to raise or lower the temperature of the soil — to Southern Hills Country Club in Tulsa, Okla., in 2019 when he was superintendent there. Myers had worked with the technology at Augusta National Golf Club and Los Angeles Country Club and was influential in making sure it was a part of Southern Hills CC’s 2019 renovation. Callahan guesses maybe 15 or 16 courses feature hydronics currently, but none use geothermal technology for all of their greens.
Southern Hills has four large air-to-water heat pumps to heat or cool the water it sends under its 26 greens. Each unit services five to eight greens, and the electrical demands can be stout. The USGA says the cost to run just one unit during a heat wave can run into the thousands of dollars daily.
Geothermal heating and cooling, however, is considerably more efficient, using the relatively constant temperature of the soil 400 or 500 feet below the surface to do the heavy heating-and-cooling lifting. Essentially, the Karsten crew can use that deep dirt as a kind of heat sink, heating the liquid above the ambient air temperature when it’s cold and, especially, cooling it in the heat of the summer.
“I approached the problem to save them energy in the maximum way possible,” says Dan Ellis, CEO of Comfortworks Inc., the Oklahoma City-based geothermal HVAC company, who designed the system from the ground down with Michael Kuhn of irrigation design consultant Michael Kuhn & Associates Inc.
Ellis explains that geothermal heating and cooling is inherently more efficient than air-based systems, and the system at Karsten trumps other traditional hydronics units in that each unit, because it operates silently and can be located near each green, only needs a 2-hp pump because of that proximity.
“The reason people install geothermal heat pumps over air is that they have operating costs one-half that of air-cooled systems,” he says. “In this application, I think it will exceed that.”
While the system could be used in cooler months to prolong the season — Callahan says a club could, say, turn the hydronics on mid-winter to warm the greens up for a one-off club event — Karsten’s interest is almost exclusively to help its new 007/777 bentgrass greens thrive in the summer swelter.
“It’s really that six weeks out of the summer that superintendents and golf courses are on the brink, watching for death from the high heat,” Callahan says. “It lengthens our window for great golf. It’s another tool to make sure the bentgrass survives that six-to-10-week spike.”
Aside from its greens and its fescue bunker faces, Karsten is wall-to-wall Tahoma 31 bermudagrass, a cultivar developed by Oklahoma State researchers. OSU was also a pioneer in geothermal energy development back in the 1980s, a connection that’s not lost on the folks at Karsten.
“There are a lot of universities and the GCSAA putting a lot of effort into finding how newer cultivars can handle the heat, but there’s 1% of golf courses where the expectations are nothing short of perfect every day,” Callahan said. “That’s where hydronics has a big play. It gives the superintendent another tool to prolong the inevitable.
“We’re fortunate that Mike Kuhn dove in on geothermal. We saw many benefits, one of which is that Oklahoma State was a pioneer for geothermal, and we’re part of that Oklahoma State community. But the second part is that it’s green and economically smart. If we can save a significant amount of money on our electric bill, that’s a benefit to us as a club, the community and the environment.”
Andrew Hartsock is GCM’s editor-in-chief.