From the hills of Golden, Colorado, to the Yosemite gateway, the CITRIS researcher and chair of electrical engineering at UC Merced researches agrivoltaics and trends in renewable energy.
Summers in Merced, the fifth-leading agricultural county in California in production, are hot, arid and tough on crops. This challenge inspired CITRIS researcher and professor of electrical engineering at UC Merced, Sarah Kurtz, to pursue agrivoltaics – the use of land for both agriculture and solar energy generation.
Temperatures in Merced routinely surpass 100 degrees in July, leaving even fully-watered crops vulnerable to the heat. But Kurtz has a potential solution: rotating solar panels. They can capture sunlight on intense heat days and provide shade, reducing water evaporation and leaf temperature.
“When it’s cool, we can rotate the panels so that the sunlight goes to the plants, and the plants will grow faster. Then, when it gets hot and we need to turn on the air conditioning load, we can adjust the panels so that they generate more electricity,” Kurtz said.
Keeping plants cool can also decrease the need for water, which is becoming increasingly scarce in Merced’s dry climate. Commonly, the county receives no rain from May through September, when crops grow the fastest.
Mentoring for the CITRIS Workforce Innovation Program
As part of her agrivoltaics project, Kurtz mentored students in the CITRIS Workforce Innovation Program (WIP) last summer. They researched ways to optimize solar panel energy and enable high crop yields underneath.
Kurtz says Erin Hestir, the director of CITRIS at UC Merced, is what draws her to CITRIS. “Erin Hestir’s leadership has been exceptional. She’s working at doing things that are very useful.”
Two of Kurtz’s agrivoltaics interns, Bryanna Gonzalez and Jasmine Salazar speak fondly of their experience with her.
Courtesy: Harvest California
“She pushed us to step out of our comfort zone. [To] ask questions and learn more about what we’re doing. I really appreciated that,” Gonzales said.
Gonzales is a first-generation student who graduated from UC Merced last spring. She learned about CITRIS through the ¡Valle! Get Your Start in Tech program at UC Merced. This annual, weekend-long workshop helps students develop networking skills, discover career pathways and build confidence.
On her CITRIS WIP application, Gonzales mentioned an interest in the energy sector, and Kurtz reached out about the internship. Now, Gonzales says her experience and Kurtz’s mentorship inspired her to want to pursue industry further.
Salazar also discovered CITRIS through ¡Valle!; this summer, she is using the skills she learned as an intern at Kiewit, in Portland, Oregon, one of the largest construction and engineering organizations in North America. She will return to UC Merced in the fall.
“Sarah is just such a genius and she’s a really great teacher,” Salazar said. “She set us up for success.”
Kurtz, in turn, says she would not have survived last summer without the three CITRIS WIP interns. She is now in the process of getting solar panels installed at UC Merced’s Experimental Smart Farm, a 40-acre climate resilience research facility that advances agricultural innovation.
Decades in the lab
Kurtz’s experience in the energy sector goes back to 1979, when she was a graduate student at Harvard pursuing a PhD in Chemical Physics. She worked alongside a professor studying how to make lower-cost solar panels with amorphous silicon cells, which are constructed using an extremely thin layer of silicon atop a substrate, such as glass, plastic, or metal.
They concluded that amorphous silicon solar cells are cheaper per watt of energy usage, but less efficient – making them more effective in low-power electronics rather than solar panels. The cells are still used in smaller devices like calculators and digital watches.
After getting her doctorate, Kurtz landed a position as a scientist in Golden, Colorado at the Solar Energy Research Institute, now known as the National Laboratory of the Rockies. She stayed there for 32 years, until leadership at UC Merced gave her a call.
“At first I said, ‘No, no, no, I’m busy with things.’ But then I thought about it a while and decided that maybe I should come, it would be an interesting experiment,” Kurtz said.
Eight years later, Kurtz has made a name for herself at UC Merced.
“At the national lab, I could accomplish more in terms of research,” Kurtz said. “Here at the university, I can accomplish more in terms of educating the next generation.”
When Kurtz first arrived at UC Merced, it had no electrical engineering program. So, with support from faculty members, she took it upon herself to create one, a project that took about five years.
“It’s a big change for the university to have an electrical engineering program,” Kurtz said. “As of fall 2026, we have 300 electrical engineering majors ranging from freshmen to seniors; we expect to graduate about 30 of them in May 2027.”
Efficient solar panels and California energy storage
In addition to creating UC Merced’s electrical engineering program, Kurtz has worked on an array of research projects at UC Merced, including Tandems for Efficient and Advanced Modules using Ultrastable Perovskites (TEAMUP), and a California Energy Commission-funded project supporting the state’s transition to a sustainable energy system.
The sun emits a spectrum of colors. Ideally, to get the most efficient solar cells, each cell would use a different material for every color of the rainbow. Currently, only silicon is used. TEAMUP’s goal is to increase efficiency by adding another material called perovskite.
TEAMUP involves a consortium of organizations, including the University of Colorado, Boulder, Arizona State University, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Swift Solar, Tandem PV, Northwestern University and the University of California, Merced. Its goal is to design perovskite-on-silicon tandem solar cells. The project has recently been restarted following federal funding cuts.
In July, Kurtz and UC Merced announced a partnership with Fremont-based solar panel company Tandem PV to test a new solar panel that uses perovskite-silicon. The high-efficiency panel sits atop a science and engineering building. Over the next several months, researchers will collect data from the panel to see how it performs.
“It would theoretically have an efficiency that could be substantially higher than the silicon,” Kurtz said.
In 2024, Kurtz wrapped up a separate CEC-funded study, whose purpose was to identify technological roles needed to bring reliable and low-cost clean electricity to California and look at the value of long-duration energy storage.
In the final report, the study found that a mixture of storage durations can support the energy grid in various ways. But as the state transitions from natural gas, long duration eight-or-more-hour battery storage options will be important during nighttime and cloudy days, when solar power is less abundant.
Kurtz is listed as an author on five 2026 papers so far and has published in Nature Energy, the American Society for Engineering Education and more. Merced is an ideal location for her research, which continues to focus on electricity and agrivoltaics.
“Agrivoltaics is a special opportunity,” she said. “The other UC campuses can also study it, but we’re in the middle of where it [crop vulnerability] is a major problem.”