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New Material Can Store Vast Amounts of Energy
ElectricSteve writes "Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet, researchers from Washington State University (WSU) have created a compact, never-before-seen material capable of storing vast amounts of energy. Described by one of the researchers as 'the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy,' the material holds potential for creating a new class of energetic materials or fuels, an energy storage device, super-oxidizing materials for destroying chemical and biological agents, and high temperature superconductors."
This will be awesome for mobile devices, if they can make it cheap and compact enough.
pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet What could possibly go wrong? (Also, FP?)
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
They can store, but how do one extract the energy ?
Freakin' giant alien robots will be stomping all over the planet now looking for it.
Anyone care to do the energy density calculation on a mass basis? Also I wonder how efficient the process is at converting mechanical energy to chemical energy?(it's almost like a gasoline engine running in reverse!)
Why do people always consider the mobile devices first??? Think big first:
...and finally after all other things bigger have been made to run on this you start creating the smaller versions.
- Energy storage for renewable to allow baseline operation
- Car fuel that only needs to be refilled monthly
- Backup generators that don't require huge fuel tanks
You never want to start small with new technology. Remember the problem with exploding Nokia's? I would not let a higher energy density version near my head until it's been tested in practice for years, no need to nuke my own head off...
Using super-high pressures similar to those found deep in the Earth or on a giant planet
In other words, it's unobtanium.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Hahaha.. this so reminds me of this.
Folks, what they've done is make Xenon Octa-fluoride, which is an order of magnitude harder than the previously created Xenon Tera-fluoride.
As cool as it is that some chemists have managed to make a new compound that had only been theorized before, it's not enough for the drooling media. So they try to explain why it is remotely relevant and interesting, and the media replies with this sort of gross stupidity.
Science reporting at its finest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Damnit, it's his watch that he paid for with his money, he can do whatever he wants with it since he owns it! So what if he wants to dual boot linux on his watch and run Apache from it while torrenting the latest American Idol, it's his right!
This isn't going to find its way into any consumer products. 70 GPa? No federal agency would certify such a device to be sold into the hands of Joe Schmoe. The more meaningful consequence of this research is the demonstration of storing mechanical energy into chemical energy. In 20 years this may lead to innovations in energy storage on a massive scale, like in solar or wind power plants.
XeF2 produces _atomic_ fluorine during decomposition. Just thinking about it makes me shiver.
Niling d-sink. BAM. Next, the Commonwealth is invaded by a malicious alien.
the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy. And totally undetectable by radiation detectors, and presumably because this was achieved by a University research team well within the capabilities of a number of countries. Doesn't it make you feel safe to know that they published ful details in Nature.
And we'd like to buy your super new material! What's that? Good for batteries, you say? Errrrr *snigger* oh yes - of course, really powerful "batteries", oh yes!
I used to study batteries and capacitors and the like in relation to energy storage, and one interesting comment I heard once was that storage utilising only chemical or electromagnetic methods cannot store more energy in a given lump of matter than the energy contained in its chemical bonds, otherwise the stored energy exceeds the "binding strength" of the substance, and it's liable to either leak the energy, not accept any more, or even explode.
This is true of even things like Ultracapacitors or flywheel storage, both of which have similar issues with breakdown largely caused by limited bond strength, despite neither using chemical energy storage.
This kind of "high pressure storage" seems to break this rule if you consider only the compressed material itself as the storage medium. If you factor in the anvil generating those pressures, then you'll find that the total system is probably quite bad at energy storage per kg of matter. There's no escaping this.
The pressure they were using is over 100GPa (1 million atmospheres), which is notably higher than the highest tensile strength of carbon nanotubes ever measured! There's no chance in hell that a practical container could be made to contain a material at those pressures. First of all, it would have to be atomically perfect, and second, it would violently explode if it received the slightest damage!
What the article was saying is that some of the energy imparted by the compression was stored as chemical energy. This is all fine and good, but I guarantee that if the pressure is lowered, that energy is released, and none of it can be stored at normal pressures.
Trust a dumbass journalist to rewrite that to mean that suddenly our electric cars will be powered by Xenon Fluoride compressed by diamond anvils, even though the original research paper doesn't mention anything of the sort!
So, considering it "CAN", but not necessarily does store it, does that mean they're having some motivational issues with this material?
Will this evolve into chemical psychology?
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
And he's going to exercise that right right until he blows up!
http://pinopsida.com
Because Hollywood screenplay writers deserve a non-fictional reference!
My car already only needs to be refilled monthly...
I was thinking, how much energy is needed to create this material ? Because if you need 1000000x the energy to store a little it's probably not as useful.
The pressure is used in a plant to create the material, the safety very much depends on how they apply that pressure. Also you could put it in the desert somewhere if that would make you feel safe.
New things are always on the horizon
I think the material won't store energy if it feels it's under too much pressure.
Oh, I'm sorry! I thought this was America...
It is the universe that makes fun of us all.
Obviously, the obligatory Futurama allusion...
``Tension, apprehension & dissension have begun!'' - Duffy Wyg&, in Alfred Bester's _The Demolished Man_
Because Earth is a Giant Planet if you're a Dwarf!
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
The substance is not stable when the pressure is released - it immediately decomposes. Carrying around the whole set-up where the typical payload (i.e. the compressed substance) is maybe 0.1% of the total weight of the apparatus is of course impractical. Also, this kind of high-pressure research is not exactly new. There are many published similar experiments where compounds undergo interesting crystal structure changes at ultra-high pressures. Nevertheless, bond strenghts limit what extra energy you can store in crystal structure variants. Xe-F bonds are definitely not among the strongest.
Currently, the only remotely realistic method for radical improvements in stored energy per weight are metastable isotopes, but even that is a far shot.
I think some folks forget that we already have some things with amazing energy densities out there. Semtex would be a good example. It is stable, moldable, and stores a whole lot of energy. However, the way it releases its energy is as an explosion, it is a plastic explosive. Well that makes it not so useful as a battery. For batteries, you want a slow release of energy, and you want that energy in an electrical form, of course. We have all kinds of substances with high energy densities, but that doesn't mean they are usefl as a battery. As the parent says, it matter how you can get the energy out.
From the summary, as best I can tell, we have invented Energon cubes. Drink it up, Autobots.
Yes...and we already know that the materials won't perform as well if they're all doped up.
... would be something the size of a softball that holds 100 MJ of energy in a physically stable state. Your flying car would be months away from the date that kind of energy storage is announced.
Years later, a doctor will tell me that I have an I.Q. of 48, and am what some people call "mentally retarded".
What manner of creature runs Linux and watches American Idol?
Some kid with a genius father, and an idiot mother? Such a person would be a half-breed, and hence a half wit!
And, no, I don't think it would work the other way around. A genius mother wouldn't be fertile for an idiot father - you couldn't even get an infertile idiot offspring (or, mule) from that match up.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Not my '91 Corolla.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Actually, it can still be very useful. The advantage of a battery is not only that it can store energy, but also makes it transportable. This would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Consider how solar cells, even though they might cost more energy to make than they will ever supply during their lifetime are still very useful powering a communication satellite. In the same way, this material might be interesting to send to outer space, or as power supply in other very remote locations.
Anyone who torrents American Idol should be shot on sight.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I dont' see anywhere in the actual article that says that once the pressure was taken off, the material spontaneously exploded. So it's possible that no containment vessel was needed.
In which case, it would make a rather powerful conventional explosive. Even if it has 1/10th the energy of nuclear material, if you pack 400kg of it into a bomb, and find a way to release it easily, you could handily have a 'pseudo nuke' which had no fallout consequences.
Or some wickedly powerful jet fuel. I imagine planes would be much more efficient if they weren't carrying half their weight in fuel, and would have significantly longer ranges.
One post on Slashdot makes the lawyers mumble
I can feel the **AA walking next to me
I just checked the abstract and accompanying figures, and there is no mentioning of vast amounts of energy there. Kim0+, M.Sc. Physics.
Gentlemen, we have our next President.
Someone tell me I'm not the only one questioning that "magazine" title. Do they mention super-strong glues anywhere, or can no one get those html pages apart to read them?
Anyone else reminded of that mythical, conspiracy-nut material from Russia that is supposed to be able to set off thermonuclear reactions without a fission primary? Imagine if you had a pellet of lithium deuteride, surrounded by a sphere of this stuff, then imploded with high explosives...
Of course, the actual research doesn't suggest anything nearly that exciting (and if it did, I doubt it would get published in Nature...) - its just the press release being a bit overzealous as usual.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
A programmer who has found true love, and trust me, it will be against his will.
That Sony is in no way involved in this!
- Car fuel that only needs to be refilled monthly?
I already have one of these (and probably nearer every two months). Of course it helps that I don't drive much and cycle to work ;-o
Ans: A Puzzlewit. The big picture is jigsawed into pieces, and the owner doesn't do puzzles.
There could be an explosion that wipes out a city when some idiot tries to open it to get the watch batteries out of it.
Speaking of explosions that wipe out cities ... I'm surprised summary nor posts I've seen so far have noted the potential for a weapon. Anything that stores energy in a compact form has the potential to release a lot of energy all at once. (Or if it was somehow impossible for the energy to get out so fast, this could be a useful military power source, for powering lasers or other high-energy destructive applications)
The requested URL
What happens when a car with this stuff gets into a crash and we see the sudden release of a few million atmospheres of pressure. In other news I hear that Ford is bring back the Pinto to use this technology.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Next step: the biosprings from The Windup Girl .
The energy used to create the material actually *is* the energy stored. Think of it as a very tightly wound-up spring.
You bend a bar of steel into a triangle, and blast it with a blue laser until the atomic structure changes to an unsynthesizable element.
Dunno... If you need 1000000x the energy, but the result can be detonated and actually release more energy per kilo than a nuke (and a cloud of atomic fluoride is just icing on the cake too), the military would drool all over it. In fact, someone probably already came in his pants reading this news.
To put it into perspective, the Manhattan Project has cost the equivalent of 20 billion 1996 dollars. (Or about 30 billion in todays dollars.) The power used by the Oak Ridge facility alone to separate the uranium that went into one of the bombs (the other was plutonium) used 10% of the total electricity produced in the USA at the time.
Compared to the modest yield of the first nukes, they genuinely pumped orders of magnitude more energy in, than they got out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I was going to post essentially what you said, but 1 million times the energy makes it somewhat less useful (lets assume that 1 million wasn't an exaggeration pulled out of the air). To make a comparison, a 1000mAh AA battery has enough energy (theoretically) in it to run a device at 1A x 1.2V for 1 hour, so in order to charge this new material to the equivalent amount of energy, you'd need to pump 1000A at 1200V into it for 1 hour (or 1000000A at 1.2V etc, but you get the idea). And then what are you going to do with the leftover 1.2MW of heat? And that's just to get an AA battery's worth of energy to a distant location.
That's a stupid example though, because you'd just use an AA battery instead. A case for this material would be where the power required was a lot higher than 1.2Wh, meaning even more energy to be pumped into it just to charge it.
So now all I need is a tray full of lasers and three geeky scientists in each of my automobiles? Sweet!
dial 9 chevrons and planet blows up!
First thing I thought of was Heinlein's Shipstone. That too would blow up if anyone tried to disassemble it, ensuring the Shipstone Corporation a virtual monopoly on the assembly process, without the tedium of a patent.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
-thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere-in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.
Those who spoke of "energy scarcity" and of "conserving energy" simply did not understand the situation. The sky was "raining soup"; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.
With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (nee Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had found-What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an "improved storage battery" (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an "improved firecracker." What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.
For what happened next I must draw from the muckraking history and from other independent sources as I just don't believe the sweetness and light of the company version. Fictionalized speech attributed to Muriel Shipstone:
"Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most. . . and no years at all in threefourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don't know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?"
"Certainly. If they don't know how I insert the-"
"Hush! I don't want to know. And walls have ears. We don't make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?"
The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don't own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old ways-burn coal, burn wood, burn oil, burn uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.
But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and all power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old ways-even the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power. . . they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.
"The people's right to know"-the people's right to know what? Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.
Any and all of "the people" are free to do as he did-he did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.
In this case, the trouble with "the people's right to know" is that it strongly resembles the "right" of someone to be a concert pianist-but who does not want to practice.
But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.
"Annoyingly assertive" translates to "I can't stand opinionated old assholes!"
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Nahhh - I can't do that. See, there really is a God. And, God put me on earth just to punish people like you, and the Anonymous Coward who called me "Annoyingly assertive". You hate me, but that is my purpose in life - to be hated by the wishy-washy liberal crowd, and the self-sure ultra-conservatives alike. It's a tough job, but SOMEONE has to do it!
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
>> What could possibly go wrong? (Also, FP?)
Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light, total protonic reversal.
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
Remember the problem with exploding Nokia's? I would not let a higher energy density version near my head until it's been tested in practice for years, no need to nuke my own head off...
Talk about the bleeding edge...
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Described by one of the researchers as 'the most condensed form of energy storage outside of nuclear energy'
Well, I guess if you count antimatter-matter reactions and the immense energy output of exotic forms of matter like those found in black holes as "nuclear energy" they have a point. The engine of the Starship Enterprise isn't what most people think of when they think of "nuclear energy."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
and the excess heat can be used to heat water to run turbines, and collect some of the energy pack :) Still inefficient, but does collect some of the waste back into use.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
What about people who just leech continuously?
An Explosion you say. Well at least Pullman Washington is in the middle of no where. :-p
Even though solar panels make MANY TIMES more energy than it takes to build them, comparing input energy to delivered electricity is an apples-oranges comparison, for several reasons. Among them:
- Much of the energy needed to make the cells is raw heat (for things like melting the glass and metal that make up its housing). You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting - paying a carnot cycle penalty.
- The job is delivering electricity in usable form to a particular location. The main competitor is the power grid. Power grids consume considerably more energy than they deliver, largely from carbon-emitting fossil fuel or nuclear reactions, on an ongoing basis. It's called "less than perfect efficiency". Solar panels consume only sunlight. Power grids also take energy - and other valueable stuff - to build: Energy to make the transformers, wire, insulators, poles, generators, boilers, switches, meters. Energy to clear a path and install them, take workers to and from the site. Trees to make poles. Land to be dedicated to power lines for lifetimes. I could go on.
There are many things of value involved in making solar power installations and power grids. Price is a good way of summarizing a basket of costs to human value. So as a first approximation when solar power is more affordable than grid power it's approximately less damaging to and consumptive of things people value.
As of about ten years ago Solar power was past cost break-even only for situations where the cost of a grid hookup was high: New construction in remote areas where the cost of running grid power was several grand, or small loads distant from a plug-in (road signs, emergency telephones, decorative yard lighting, ...) Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Why do people always consider the mobile devices first [when the story is about a possible improved method of energy storage]???
Because fixed devices generally have access to a local power-supply infrastructure, while many mobile devices are limited by available energy storage technology.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'm no expert, but I seem to recall from an article that I read that the pressure of "a million atmospheres" was created by tightening the screws on the anvil by hand. If that's true, it hardly seems like a practical setup for storing and retrieving massive amounts of energy.
Nothing there about how stable or how it scales.
Kind of useless if it is like one those elements that can only exist for a small fraction of a pico-second before it destabilizes and vaporizes, or becomes something else. Also not much use if they are talking about storage per volume, where volume has to be measured by an electron microscope, and the energy stored unable to do anything but be measured scientifically.
It also doesn't help that it has to be under something like 1,000,000 earth atmospheres. As that makes it inherently both dangerous, and difficult to work with.
Reminds me of the anime movie "Steamboy". If fact now that I think of it, it is kinda of exactly the same. I hope I don't spoil the plot when I say it doesn't end well.
Recently, even without government subsidies, it has been approaching price break-even for sunny suburban locations.
We're well past this break-even point, even without incentives. Panels will more than pay for themselves, without incentives, in most of the united states. (possibly all, but there's probably some guy who lives in a cave who would disagree) With incentives, our payback is about 5-6 years. Without them, it would take 15, but the panels have a 25-year warranty and an expected life of 40+ years, so we're set either way. There are even companies now who will install them for free, and then lease them to you at a rate lower than your electric bill was.
What manner of creature runs Linux and watches American Idol?
A hacker who's lost the remote?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Don't you feel old, when references to things like flubber bounce around in your head?
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
his would be very useful to move an energy source to a location where power generation is not (easily) possible.
Notice that no one discussed the efficiency of the energy storage occurring here. It seems that while the ratio of energy to mass is extraordinarily high the process is very inefficient. The amount stored being a small fraction of the energy used to achieve it. This will probably wind up being used as an explosive.
The kind that likes to go phishing.
"You'd be a fool to use solar electricity for smelting"
Hi, we have this thing called electromagnetic induction. We can use solar as the source of required energy and we have used it for smelting ALL THE TIME.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
apparently, its not that bad, because the tool they did it with would fit on your desk with room for your laptop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_anvil_cell
it seems that the basic idea is things like levers to apply force and all that force is concentrated to the point of a diamond that is well, pointy, and very small. kinda along the lines of '3mph ain't bad when its a pillow to the face, but it really sucks when its the tip of a sword'
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
naquadah?
They better not patent this. I call prior art- Energon cubes!
Don't replicate the astroturfing of the anti solar business -- they are running scared.
Off the grid since 1979 - using primarily the tech available then, and loving it-- and everything I bought then still works, except for some battery replacements. The "just wait, we're going from 14% efficiency to 20% soon and it will cost 5% less per watt is just another form of the same antisolar spin. The new thin film stuff is neither as good or as rugged in real live use. Most of the cost is now in the other stuff. Like real glass, plastic that matches tempco to the cells, frames, batteries, inverters...and so forth. www.coultersmithing.com
Why guess when you can know? Measure!
Ok. Who brought the dog?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The Battery; could this design be a useful solution?
Damnit, it's his watch that he paid for with his money, he can do whatever he wants with it since he owns it! So what if he wants to dual boot linux on his watch and run Apache from it while torrenting the latest American Idol, it's his right!
Yes but he'd be more popular if he skipped idol and just blew up the city block.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It says - mechanical energy --> the chemical energy some gadget which does ----- lightning --> mechanical --> chemical ---- will surely help in solving energy problem. ---------- harvesting lightning bolts!
Just out of curiosity, where do you live? I'm assuming you have clear skies 90% of the time?
In Michigan, where I live, I'm not sure it's as simple as that. :(
Well, Washington State University is already in the middle of nowhere so that's basically already done.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
But if you're going to do that why throw away a carnot-cycle penalty? Use a solar furnace and get the heat directly. Much cheaper.
Induction furnaces are about control, not efficiency.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Depending how it would decompose, it could be used for propulsion outside the atmosphere, where weight to energy ratios are so important that nuclear bombs as propellant were once seriously considered.
Indeed -- nobody should ever want to go there. They should particularly not want to live there, as it has nothing to offer. Same with its neighboring city, Moscow, Idaho. Don't go there, ever. The Palouse is a horrible, boring place.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Hmmm,
Not sure of the physics here but if it can store that much energy and energy always finds its way (eventually) to heat don't we have a fantastic heat engine source? Drive your heat engine car coast to coast no refueling?
cursethedarkness
I once saw a documentary about similar technology. I think it utilized steam as the core material.
Read the rest of this comment...
Or maybe to help replace the used up ZPMs the all the way down at the Ancient's outpost in Antarctica
that way if ever the ga'ould try to take over, we'll be ready for them...
A technological buzz word used in Niven's 'Known Space' universe for ... a high power-to-weight (and power-to-volume) ratio energy storage device.
No laws of physics broken, just technology developed. 'Start Rek', eat your script-writer's heart out ; oh, you did already.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Just like with a bank account -- some days you make more than you spend, and have the extra for those other days. For really long strings of bad solar weather, of course you burn some gasoline, which is pretty expensive power -- but by system design you keep that minimal, indeed.
Yes, there are fewer successful solar installations in Michigan than here, not a big surprise. If I lived there, I'd probably be looking into a more-diverse alternative power system that took advantage of what you do have in abundance -- perhaps wind off the lakes? Since I don't live there, I really have no idea what would work best.
Even here, when I go help with a solar system design/install, the first step is to check the situation out before any money gets spent. In suburbia it often happens that the sun is more or less blocked by something on some land the customer doesn't own, and there's not much that can be done about that one.
Even here there is a huge Oak tree I refuse to cut down that eats about 20% of my input in the winter. I just love that beautiful thing, so I added enough panels to still be fine.
To do the money analogy a bit more, as long as you're making a little more than you spend, you feel rich. A little less income than outgo - and you are in bad shape.
Why guess when you can know? Measure!