ENR 2024 Top 25 Newsmakers
Stuart Yanow: Guiding Light During the Tricky Drilling of the 900-well Geothermal Field at the Microsoft Thermal Energy Center
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Yanow’s professional mechanical engineer credential and his experience both designing and building geothermal systems gave GeoTility a leg up over other contractors.
Photo courtesy Dan Delong for Microsoft
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Project of the Year: Microsoft Thermal Energy Center Showcases Geothermal Heating and Cooling
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It’s serendipitous for the Microsoft Thermal Energy Center team that young Stuart Yanow decided to take his older sister’s advice and major in mechanical engineering rather than health sciences. “I didn’t grow up dreaming to be an engineer,” says Yanow, president of GeoTility, the geothermal heating and cooling system contractor for the Microsoft TEC. “My sister recommended engineering because she knew I liked to fix things.”
Fix things is exactly what GeoTility did at the TEC, when the situation got murky during drilling of the 6.5-acre well field. “We had to get through quite a bit of chaos,” says Mark Krewedl, vice president of operations for MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions, TEC’s mechanical and plumbing contractor, which hired GeoTility, in part based on Yanow’s mechanical engineer credential.
“The geology in the region was difficult to drill in, even on the best of days,” says Yanow, who started out designing the renewable-energy systems in the early 2000s, when working as a Stantec consulting engineer.
The TEC—the central utility plant for Microsoft’s redone campus in Bellevue, Wash.—was ENR’s 2023 Project of the Year. Its geothermal system is one of the nation’s largest and deepest, at mostly 550 ft. Midwest Geothermal, a sub to GeoTility, drilled through hard till, strewn with remnants of buildings past and boulders. To get 900 viable wells, the team had to drill 940. There was redesign during construction.
During it all, Yanow provided “better engineering backup, a higher level of 3D modeling underground and an extra level of confidence” to the TEC team, which had little experience with geothermal, says Krewedl.
Even GeoTility had not worked at this scale and depth. Through it all, Yanow remained the team’s “calm guiding light and patient professor,” says Mike Martel, senior project manager for GLY Construction, TEC’s contractor. “It took someone who had the patience to teach us about the system, which freed us to concentrate on logistics.”
Yanow, who grew up in Montreal, works at GeoTility headquarters in Kelowna, British Columbia. But he oversees all three offices, including Seattle and Vancouver, Wash., and is responsible for all in-house engineering.
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For TEC’s well-field construction, Yanow credits his colleague Chris Coley, the Seattle office’s branch manager. “Chris was in the trenches, day after day,” says Yanow, age 49.
In 2001-02, while at Stantec, Yanow took courses in geothermal system design. He was determined to carve out a niche.
He met Jim Leask, GeoTility’s founder and CEO, on a Stantec project.
Yanow says his pivotal career moment was on Dec. 6, 2005, when he joined GeoTility, jumping the fence from consulting to contracting. “I saw the opportunity to be involved at the grassroots level,” says Yanow, a GeoTility shareholder and Leask’s heir apparent.
About 75 people currently, GeoTility had about 30 people in 2005. Even then, “Jim had an engineer on staff,” whom Yanow succeeded.
GeoTility’s systems serve institutions, school districts, college campuses and a few residential developments. About a decade ago, GeoTility built the system for the world’s busiest border crossing, the San Ysidro Land Port of Entry in California.
Spurred by decarbonization, Yanow foresees a “major resurgence in geoexchange,” as some are now calling geothermal to differentiate it from geothermal power.
Despite the agita at the TEC field, Yanow maintains GeoTility did “very well” on the job, though he declines to offer specifics. He says, “I’d do one of those projects every year, if I could.”
