When it doesn’t rain, the Morey Solar Field in Middleton glimmers with dew. Well over two dozen rows of solar panels span this field, gazing up at an angle toward the sun during the early morning and whirring occasionally as they rotate into noon sunlight.
This field is where sophomore Liz Sanchez Garcia collects her data each week, setting up flags in both open sections of the field and in the shade beneath the solar panels. They mark the spots where she usually installs her equipment — a gas analysis device shaped like a backpack, a clear chamber she built herself, a weather meter and her laptop into which she feeds live data of the changing gas concentrations in the chamber. Sometimes a plane takes off from the Middleton Municipal Airport a few hundred yards away from the field.
Sanchez Garcia is studying computer science and environmental studies. She’s spending her summer with the Letters & Science Summer of Excellence in Research (LASER) program. It’s an eight-week undergraduate program in which students within a wide range of STEM majors conduct research on their project of choice, mentored by UW–Madison faculty or staff members.
Sanchez Garcia conducts research under the mentorship of Professor Ankur Desai, the chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences (AOS). But much of her work is also done in the company of other lab members in Desai’s Ecometeorology Lab, where students of all levels contribute to research on the ways climate changes or weather changes both influence and are influenced by ecosystems.
“At first, I was really scared,” Sanchez Garcia says. “I had to write a research proposal about what I was going to dedicate my summer to do.”
But initial reservation became excitement to work firsthand on the equipment that will serve a substantial role in the lab’s research on agrivoltaics — the combination of solar panels and agriculture that’s becoming a serious option in transitioning the nation to renewable energy sources.
“As climate is changing and issues of sustainability are rising to the forefront, there’s been questions about how we transition our energy away from fossil fuels,” Desai says.
Solar energy, for example, is one of the largest sources of renewable energy in the world. But it also takes up a lot of land – often in competition with farmland – or threatens sensitive ecosystems.
“One of the solutions to deconflict this issue lies in the field of agrivoltaics, which asks whether we can harvest solar power while also growing crops under these panels,” Desai says.
Existing research in the southwestern United States found it beneficial to install solar panels on farmland. The panels block the sun in a region with too much sunlight, which allows the plants underneath the panels to use less water, especially in drought-heavy regions. But until a few years ago, this research had never been conducted in regions of the humid Midwest like Wisconsin.
Sanchez Garcia’s research is part and parcel of a larger research effort in Desai’s lab to study how solar panels affect water, carbon and the productivity of crops, as well as how changing light conditions impact vegetation. In recent years, as part of a collaboration with Alliant Energy, UW–Madison had been planning and building an agrivoltaics research facility in Kegonsa, Wisconsin near Stoughton. Meanwhile, in 2023, the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education awarded Desai and other researchers a Research Forward grant to establish an Agrivoltaic Observatory at the facility in Kegonsa.
When Sanchez Garcia entered the program, she joined the endeavor to collect data at existing solar farms while the facility was being constructed. The Morey solar field (operated by Madison Gas & Electric) was one of these solar farms where they could begin collecting data.
An important but daunting task in Sanchez Garcia’s research was figuring out how to build the tool that would measure the productivity in the environment, or the amount of sunlight converted to plant tissue after accounting for metabolism and decomposition produced. To do this she would have to first measure the amount of flux — how much greenhouse gasses like carbon dioxide are being absorbed or released due to photosynthesis and respiration.
But the task was not as intimidating as it seemed.
“I think the moment I realized I was less scared and more excited was when I had to cut a metal board,” Sanchez Garcia says. “Someone just handed me a handsaw. Right there and then I just searched up ‘how to use a handsaw’ and cut it up in ten minutes.”
“We bought all sorts of off-the-shelf parts,” Desai says, crediting a $500 research fund allocated for the project by LASER. “Plexiglas, glue, pool noodles, computer fans. It was almost like a kind of puzzle.”
Soon she had built her very own clear gas chamber by hand. In the field, she places this clear box over a patch of vegetation. She checks if the chamber is plugged into the gas analyzer. And after setting up her laptop to collect the live measurements of the gasses as the plants photosynthesize, she also sets up a weather meter for collecting supplemental data like temperature and wind levels. Finally, when the measurements are done in plain sunlight, she moves to a shaded area under the solar panels, where she’ll move to a spot just outside the horizontal shadows.
Driving out to the field, working on self-built devices — for Sanchez Garcia, this is a kind of preview of her aspirations for graduate research.
“One of my personal goals is to get more familiar with research,” she says. “It’s really nice to get a small bite of what I’ll be doing if I was in graduate school.”
Even so, Sanchez Garcia describes how, as a first-generation college student, the prospect of graduate research is fairly new.
“I didn’t really think about graduate school until a few months ago,” she says. “Now that I’m learning more about what it means to be a researcher, being in graduate school seems kind of like being a scientist, communicating with people and finding out about the world.”
Sanchez Garcia’s experience also reflects a sense of what it’s like to be among other fellow scientists. She describes meeting other undergraduate students in the program’s weekly course, many of whom study different fields.
“I think it’s really cool to hear about others’ research,” Sanchez Garcia says. “I would never know as much about atomic particles as they do, but it’s interesting to see what others my age or my year are working on.”
Sanchez Garcia hopes to continue her research with Desai once the LASER program wraps up in August. For many students, a summer program like LASER serves as a small bite of what researchers do. And for some it can sprout into an aspiration, or maybe just expand ever so slightly their idea of what being a researcher can mean.