GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

People often grumble when GM raises the idea of getting the electric grid infrastructure ready in anticipation of the Chevy Volt’s launch.  Since charging the Volt is like running two plasma screen TVs at night, what’s the fuss?  I had the chance to ask that question and others of Britta Gross who is GM’s direct of infrastructure development.  Today at 4PM EDT you can ask her your own questions as well when she joins Mark Duvall, director of the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), in the live chatbox below.

If there is excess capacity at night and we are going to charge our cars at night, and studies show there is plenty of capacity, why are we so worried about infrastructure?
We’re really not. But there will come a day when there are millions of vehicles and the road and we want to make sure we’ve anticipated correctly what that will mean. It’s not those low numbers in the thousands were worried about.

Although at night there is capacity, there will be people charging during the day. There is a lot of excess grid capacity even during the day too, for many months of the year.

It comes down to about a dozen days a year, mostly during hot summer day afternoons from four to six PMs and for a few places very cold mornings when they get close to their peak power-generating capacity. And so even if low numbers of vehicles are charging at that time, we care about what that might mean for the grid.

So we want to make sure everything is thought through, that we have the right smarts on the vehicle and the right smarts on the grid and the utilities to be able to communicate with the vehicles to simply delay charging if it happens to be at a peak time. Consumers might agree to let utilities delay their charging in exchange for lower rates.

For people to benefit from this won’t they need a special variable rate meter?
Yes, time of use metering.

If someone doesn’t have one of these meters they can’t benefit from delaying charging, so how will you educate people?
That’s exactly the dialog we’re working on. Utilities are growing right now and evolving. I have a list of things I want them to consider doing in their states to help make the transition to electric cars smoother.

Historically people buy cars on how they look, behave and cost, and now you’re throwing in a fourth variable, and it seems having to educate people more deeply might make it harder to make a sale?
And for that reason I don’t want to overcomplicate it. I think we’ve learned a lesson in the last 12 months. When people ask me about public charging I say its a ‘nice to have’ but not a ‘must have’. The vehicle has been designed to plug into standard outlets. So it’s as simple as finding a plug. We want to go the extra mile and consider the needs of apartment-dwellers or people who want to extend their range and charge at work. We are going to look at some ways of enticing corporations to allow employee charging at work.

Also keep in mind the average cost of electricity is 10 cents per kwh so for most people without off peak considerations it will cost 80 cents per day to drive 40 miles. We’d like to get that to 40 cents, but never lose site of how easy the basics are.

Prabakhar Patil is the CEO of Compact Power Inc.  CPI is a subsidiary for LG Chem, the Korean company that was awarded with the Chevy Volt cell supplier contract.  CPI helped GM to develop the packs for the Volt.  I had a chance to interview Dr. Patil on the current status of the relationship and operations.

Where are things with respect to pack development and considering GM’s announcement about in house pack and your relationship with them?
The relationship is good and unchanged because the decision for GM to manufacture the pack in-house after they got into volume production had been made some time ago. We agreed to it in the spirit of partnership because for strategic reasons it was important for GM to do this in house, even though we were prepared to support them in high volume production.

Right now nothing has really changed. As you know we shipped around 50 packs last year, this year we are shipping around 400 packs and that continues to happen. We are validating the pack design, the manufacturing process etc, and these are the prototype packs that are going into GM vehicles. That part is exactly the same as it would have been were we to make the high volume production packs.

So the prototype packs are currently being produced at your facility?
Yes, and they will continue to be made here until GM’s facility is up and running.

Are you helping GM to prepare their facility?
We work together. It’s a joint team that is actually at work.

As a subdivision of LG Chem, will you continue to work in GM’s facility?
No, once the production moves to their facility our role will be more supportive.

LG Chem got a $150 million DOE grant for setting up a cell manufacturing facility that will be locating in Michigan?
As you know, up to now the cells are made in Korea and we assemble, engineer, design and manufacture the pack here. The DOE grant is targeted at making the cells here. That has always been our plans and our footprint but this helps expedite the process.

So you are going to build a US battery factory from the ground up with that money?
Yes.

When will you start construction?
We probably will complete the site selection process by the end of this year and then we’ll be breaking ground sometime next year. We have to go through all the permits and site preparation and all that stuff. More importantly in terms of production, the first of the cell lines in that new facility we expect to come on in production rates by second quarter of 2012. It will be fully done with all of the cell lines and electrode lines and all that stuff a year later. At that point, it will be capable of producing enough cells to support anywhere from 50,000 to 250,000 vehicle packs depending on how many cells the packs contain.

Is that factory going to solely be used for the Volt pack or might it be used for other automakers?
It is not tied to a single application or customer, that’s part of the flexibility that we will have that it can support different applications. Because as you know the cells for the Volt will initially come from Korea. In fact, that cell line is already up. It has to be in order for us to have certified cells that have to be ready well ahead of the vehicle launch so GM can go ahead with the pack validation and so forth.

That cell line is already up. That will be used to supply cells for the Volt until the cell line here comes on line, so we have a lot of flexibility.
As far as GM or any other customer is concerned they won’t be able to tell the difference as to whether the cell is made here or in Korea.

The cells for the Volt, are they pretty much going to be a standard LG automotive cell for all applications or are you developing differently nuanced cells for different applications?
There have to be different nuances. For example, if you go from a non plugin hybrid to a BEV there are three discrete types of cells that you need. On plugin HEV like hybrids, the power to energy ratio is high, because those hybrid configurations don’t need large pure electric range.

On the other end of the spectrum the battery electric vehicle where the energy density requirements are very significant when you get to 50 or 100 miles of range. The P to E ratio in that case is relatively low then. Plug in HEV cells like the Volt are in between in order for the cells to be optimized we have to tweak the chemistry or the recipe.

An astute observer noticed none other than a pre-production Chevy Volt integration vehicle nonchalantly parked in a neighbor’s driveway.

A fleet of eight of these vehicles just returned from a 3-day 1200-mile extended test drive last week, and perhaps one of the lucky participants got to take one home for the weekend. It is known that 80 of these cars are in existence and nvolced in continuous and extensive testing

General Motors engineers are often given the opportunity to take home pre-production vehicles prior to launch.  In fact, some of the learning that goes into the refinement of these vehicles is derived from these take-home experiences.

However, these IVer Volts are unusually early in development for this type of endeavor.  Most pre-production cars are taken home just a few months prior to launch when they are usually at a high level of refinement. The fact that they are already allowed home appears to confirms the great confidence GM has with their robustness and the particularly advanced level of development they have already achieved in such a short time.

No, its not my house.

Apparently this is nothing new. According to GM spokesperson Rob Peterson, “several engineers have already taken these vehicles home over weekends.”

Source (Autoblog)

Coskata, Inc. is a pioneering cellulosic ethanol production company. It was announced in January 2008, that GM had invested and taken an ownership stake in the company.

Coskata has developed a proprietary high temperature plasma gasification process that turns any carbon-containing waste or biological product into ethanol. In the first step the carbon containing material is gassified into CO and hydrogen. Proprietary microorganisms then combine both gases directly into ethanol. In the final step the ethanol is separated from the water.

The technique does not rely on expensive enzymes, as the microorganisms can reproduce themselves.

A great value of the technology is that ethanol can be made from many sources including numerous feedstocks, wood biomass, agricultural waste, sustainable energy crops, and garbage, old tires, and construction waste. It yields a 7 to 1 energy ratio and uses half the water it takes to produce gasoline.

Earlier this week the company opened a small-scale or semi-production facility in Madison PA that is capable of producing 50,000-gallons-a-year.

This facility demonstrates the capability of scaling up the technology from the laboratory into the 65 foot high structure. The next step will be opening a full scale production facility capable of producing 55 million gallons per year in 2012.

According to the company’s CEO Wes Bolen, the cost of the process is about $1 to make one gallon of ethanol.

As part owner, GM is also one of Coskata’s first customers.

“We invested in Coskata so that we could enable the rapid deployment of commercially viable and environmentally sustainable ethanol globally,” said Bob Babik, GM Vehicle Emissions Director. “We’re proud to say that we have already accepted some of Coskata’s ethanol at our Milford facility.”

As we know the Chevy Volt itself is E85 capable, and on one leg of the recent extended development test drives, the Volt prototypes were filled with E85 to analyze function using that fuel source.

Source (Coskata)

It was long thought that shortly after the Chevrolet Volt went into production in Michigan that a plant would open in Europe to produce the Ampera.

The front runner for this plant had been the Ellesmere Port plant in the United Kingdom, given the strong backing of the state government, and their willingness to subsidize the project to protect jobs.

On Tuesday, however, the Magna consortium reportedly decided it will not produce the Volt’s cousin at this time, and that the reason for this decision is that they feel demand will not exceed the amount of investment needed at this time.

In a report first brought forth by British media, it was said that Magna did not shut the door on ever producing the Ampera in UK, but felt it would not likely again consider that as a option until 2015 or 2016 in the project’s 2nd generation; although a mystery Vauxhall ‘source’ later said that demand, “rather than the launch of the second-gen model, will drive the decision on timing.”

As of now the plan is to export the Ampera/Chevrolet Volt from the DHAM facility in Michigan indefinitely. Naturally, this may cause a strain on capacity and availability of the Volt going forward both domestically and internationally if demand has been underestimated.

Vauxhall’s unofficial-official stance from “sources” on this leak (according to autocar) was:

“There has categorically been no decision on where European production of the Ampera will take place, but in order to justify production at any European plant there will need to be sufficient demand…Obviously we would like to see it built at Ellesmere Port as the Ampera is underpinned by the new Astra. It would make sense”

According to our own GM “sources” here at GM-Volt, Ampera production volumes will be “minimal” anyway. One has to wonder if this development could cast doubt on whether the Ampera reskin of the Volt will indeed happen at all.

One unintended advantage to GM because of this development, is that the recent major devaluing of the US dollar against most major currencies has made exporting cars a much more profitable business. Provided that trend continues, any US made-European sold Voltec vehicle, should be profitable.

This is clearly a question that is important to answer.

Since the Volt was introduced in January 2007, many EV programs and EV concepts have emerged. President Obama was elected and pledged to put 1 million electric cars on the road by 2015. The hydrogen car future has been put in doubt. Oil reached nearly $150 per barrel. The world economy nearly collapsed. GM and Chrysler entered and left bankruptcy. US Car sales went from nearly 17 million per year to rates below $10 million. Rick Wagoner lost his job. A123 Systems went public. EEStor still hasn’t shown us anything.

All the while, GM-Volt.com and you, its audience of EV early adopters, have chugged along.

At this point GM admits there are over 50,000 people waiting for a Volt as this site can attest, and Nissan claims more than 20,000 will pre-order its LEAF EV next Spring.

Nissan’s CEO Carlos Ghosn thinks 10% of car sales will be electric in 2020. A very recent Credit-Suisse report predicts 1.1% of global cars sales will be electric by 2015, and that EV sales will be worth $400 billion by 2030 and sales of lithium ion batteries will reach $100 billion by the same year. It is also predicted widespread adoption of EVs will reduced petroleum consumption by 4 million barrels per day by 2030.

There are several factors which are at work to promote electric car adoption, especially a growing interest in reducing reliance on petroleum for social, environmental, and economical reasons.

Similarly, forces resist the change such as image, range limits, cost, and recently lower gas prices.

So what is the true demand for EVs?

From October 19th to 21st the first ever “Business of Plugging In” conference will take place in Detroit which will attempt to answer and discuss this and other relevant issues. It will bring together many influential people in the electric car industry for a series of workshops and discussions. Speakers will include such people as Wesley Clark, George Pataki, Bill Ford and Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm. Executives from A123 Systems, Kleiner-Perkins, GM, Fisker, and Think will join many others.

One particular session will be called “The Consumer: Who, When and Why?” and will include Tony Posawatz of GM and Felix Kramer of CalCars.org. You can join them here today in a multi-blog livechat in the box below at 3:30 EDT, and help start the conversation.