This week our team had our first visit at the Wellborn NextEra site. The site was huge, about 350 acres, just off the highway with about 3000 solar panels. We finally had the pleasure of meeting our Liaison Ted along with our other NextEra contacts Sharon and Nico. They shared their experiences with NextEra as well as their expertise in the field.

After a quick introduction we got to work collecting soil samples through various parts of this massive site. We collected about 8 samples from different elevations, at various depths, and distances to different components of our solar site for accuracy. You could even say we were digging for the root of the cause!

Once the site visit was over, Sarah and Sasha gave the rest of the team a tour of Frazier Hall where they spend most of their time and where the majority of our soil sampling will take place. After we dropped off the 8 enormous bags of soil, we decided to continue on and have some team bonding. We got dinner together as a team after a long 7-hour day in our steel toed boots per Aayan’s suggestion, we went to Chili’s! We sat down and as our teammate Philip T said, we “proceeded to dig into the volcano molten lava cake even harder than we dug for soil all day long!”