GM-VOLT : Chevy Volt Electric Car Site

Generally we only cover topics related to electric cars, but the buzz this week has been so intense, its worth a look at something new called the Bloom Box.

More specifically the Bloom Energy Server was first unveiled last week to the world.

The device is a scalable fuel cell stack.  It receives natural gas or biofuel and electrochemically combines it with oxygen producing electricity as a result, in a clean non-combustive process.

The device operates at extremely high temperatures (800 degrees) and uses solid oxide fuel cells made of low cost ceramic materials. This is in significant distinction to older technology fuel cells that rely on expensive precious metals such as platinum.

Bloom Energy Systems is the Silicon Valley start-up company funded in part by Kleiner-Perkins that has secretively been developing these competitively prices fuel cells over the last decade and has already sold and installed 100 kw units at major corporations such as Wal Mart and Google, at a cost of $700,000 to $800,000 each. These units are powerful enough to power 100 homes 24/7 and yet take up only roughly the size of a single parking space.

These devices have already been operating nearly flawlessly for several months.  EBay is one customer that has switched on three units that now provide 15% of the company’s electricity needs.

The electricity is produced at a cost of 8 to 10 cents per kilowatt hour, which is significantly lower than rates in some parts of the country.

CEO KR Sridhar was previously a fuel cell scientist at NASA and has led the creation of these new devices using a special amped up R&D program.  Bloom Energy’s key breakthrough has been developing a commercialization process of making these solid oxide cells affordably.

Sridhar envisions the day in the next few year a Bloom Box the size of a brick, at a cost a few thousand dollars could be purchased by the public for powering their individual homes.

When the electricity is produced from natural gas, emissions of just 773 lbs/MW-hr of CO2 is created, and natural gas supply is already abundant in this country.  When running on biofuel, electricity is carbon neutral.  Furthermore, since power will be produced locally , the role of the grid is reduced and excess energy could be even sold back to power companies.  The company plans to make future generation devices also capable of storing energy.

Certainly electric cars could be charged by Bloom energy servers as well, eliminating the need for coal-buring powerplants.

So will the Bloom Box change the world over the next decade?

Your guess is as good as mine.

Source (Bloom Energy)

Tom Stephens is GM’s vice chairman for global product development and spoke Tuesday at the Renewable Fuels Association conference in Florida.

He told attendees that GM is spending $100 million each year to develop cars that are E85 (85% ethanol/15% gasoline) or “flex-fuel” capable, and that “ethanol is the best near-term solution to displace petroleum.”

He said by 2012, half of the cars GM sells will be capable of running on E85.

The problem is, as Stephens sees it, there aren’t enough E85 pumps available to drivers.

“Today’s there’s 2,200 (ethanol fuel stations) that are out there but that’s not enough,” he said. “Two-thirds of the pumps are concentrated in 10 states and those 10 states have only about 19 percent of the flex-fuel vehicles that we have on the road.”

Stephens calls this discrepancy “a big problem for us.”

“GM is spending about $100 million a year adding flex-fuel capability to our vehicles. “We can’t afford to leave this capital stranded,” he added.

Stephens called for the installation of 10,000 additional E85 stations across America to “have ethanol fuel available for every one of our customers within about two miles of where they live.”

He said government intervention will be needed to achieve this goal.

“I think it would be very helpful if we could get government assistance,” he said. “But I really want the oil industry,…the government and…us to just work together to make ethanol a reality.”

With respect to the Volt, we also learn for the first time that the initial production run of the car will not be E85 capable.

“We are finalizing some of our options and the associated timing that goes with them,” said Volt executive Tony Posawatz. “The E85 capable emission package will have its timing finalized soon.”

“It will not be available for November 2010,” he confirmed.

This actually substantiates a rumor we first reported here in August of 2007.

According to Stephens, GM does eventually plan to introduce E85 capable Chevy Volts a year or so after production begins.

The original Chevy Volt concept car was described as having twin 6 gallon gas tanks, 50 MPG in charge sustaining mode, and thus 600 miles of gasoline range.

With production, these parameters were changed.

GM has not announced the production Volt’s miles per gallon in charge sustaining mode, though the evidence suggests it will be somewhere between 30 and 50 MPG.

The size of the gas tank has also not been released yet, though in November Edmunds claimed it was 8 gallons, and went on to speculate that the Volt would thus get 38 mpg in charge sustaining mode.

“That’s interesting speculation on their part,” said Volt chief engineer Andrew Farah.  ” But I haven’t told anybody who’s asked how big it is.”

“We’re not releasing the size of the tank yet,” he added.

Previously, then Volt executive Frank Weber told GM-Volt.com that the tank would be between 6 and 10 gallons, and Farah confirms at least that it is less than 10 gallons.

But why is GM being so vague about this figure?

“The reason we’re not (announcing it yet) is we want to make sure we get over 300 miles of fuel range,” says Farah.  ”We’re going to tweak it as such and I’ve got plenty of time to do that.”

Thus it seems GM is aiming for 300 miles of gasoline range, and therefore average real world charge sustaining miles per gallon will be the principle determinant of how many gallons is needed to reach that goal.

The graphic above shows the underside of the Volt after a crash test.  The light blue object behind the battery is the fuel tank.  In the graphic below the tank can be seen from above sitting behind the T-shaped battery pack.

How big is it? You decide.

The other day I was in my office when my cell phone rang. I picked it up and on the other end heard a strong voice with a slight Texas drawl, “Dr. Dennis? Hi , Ed Whitacre here.”

You could imagine how taken aback I was, caught by surprise, but quite thrilled and honored.

You see I had been trying to reach out to Mr. Whitacre for a while to learn about his perspective on electric cars, and thanks to GM communications leadership it very suddenly became a reality.

I joked with him that we shared something in common, neither he or I knew much about cars before we started these roles, and he agreed. “I don’t know anything about cars, ” he admitted.

But clearly he knows how to run a business.

I asked why he took the job at GM.

“The government called me in the summer, the Treasury Department, and asked me if I would consider being Chairman,” he said. “I had been at AT&T many years and was happily retired and so I said no I won’t, and they called back the next day and the next day and my conscience finally got to me and I agreed to be Chairman of the Board. I did that for about four months.”

Since it wasn’t much publicized I asked about why Fritz Henderson was fired.

“The board had the feeling GM wasn’t moving quickly enough or the right way, so Fritz left,” he said. “He’s a great guy and he left. I’m pretty old but there wasn’t any other candidate at the time. I had been chairman of AT&T for 17 years so I said yes I could be the CEO.”

“I don’t expect to stay in the position long,” he said. “There’s a search committee doing a search.”

As you might know, Mr. Whitacre also sits on the Board of Directors of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s largest petroleum producers, and it is of interest to see how he might reconcile that with the mission of GM’s Chevy Volt, to help wean our country off of oil.

“ExxonMobil is very concerned about the environment and the future also,” Whitacre said. The company works towards “finding different sources (of energy) and converting to natural gas.”

“We provide the fuel to a lot of powerplants that generate electricity, and there’s a lot of scientific work as well like growing algae (for biofuels),” he added.

He described ExxonMobil as being “responsible citizens,” and noted there is opportunity for the company in a world of electric cars.

“They’re tuned into the electric car,” he said. “As good as (our electric cars) are, the electricity has to be generated by some fossil fuel.”

That the CEO of GM reached out to me and us, and was genuinely thankful for our work here on GM-Volt.com is a very, very wonderful thing. Stay tuned for some more of our conversation.

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)

Since the Volt is at its core and electric car, people often ask whether it will be able to run without any gas in its tank.

According to Volt vehicle line engineer Tony Posawatz, “the VOLT can run without gas since it is an EV.”

Here’s how he explains it:

We will provide many tips to customers on how they can get the most out of their VOLT as we continue the education process, work our demo programs and train our dealers and customers at the point of sale. For example, we will recommend that they keep some gas in their tank to avoid range anxiety and if they are always driving in EV, we want to make sure that once every month or so, we can perform a maintenance run on the engine (for keeping the engine parts lubricated and the gas from getting stale).

This will be done automatically for the customer because of the intelligence built right into the car. We don’t want to have the customers worry about putting additive in their gas tanks like snowmobilers and boaters have to. If the customer runs primarily in EV mode, we would also suggest that they not keep their tank full. That’s a lot of extra mass to carry around. Prior to a long trip is the right time to gas up at one of our countries 170,000 gas stations.

As to whether the car can run without its battery he says “the VOLT can run with an injured battery but not without a battery in the car.”

Finally Posawatz declares “the VOLT is a very smart car, it will be the smartest device on the smart grid of the future.”