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)

Most of us want electric cars for all the benefits of getting away from petroleum.  A burgeoning field likely to play a more prominent role in the future, however, is vehicle-to-grid or V2G.

The idea is to allow one’s plugged in electric car act as a repository for the electric grid, letting utilities borrow energy stored in a car’s battery in exchange for a fee.

Earlier this week a group of experts convened to discuss and plan for this at the American Association for Advancement of Science meeting in San Diego.

Spotlighted by MSNBC was a company called PJM Interconnections that coordinates the power grid for 13 states including Washington DC.  Their  job is to balance the load between supply and demand, a fragile interplay that could benefit from thousands of connected buffers supplied by electric car batteries.

PJM needs about 1% of the total grid peak demand available in the form of a buffer, which amounts to 1000 megawatts.  ”We have 1,000 megawatts moving up and down,” said Ken Huber, a principle at the company.

Presently PJM pays battery providers $25 to $35 per megawatt hour to keep that buffer available.  Once enough electric cars become connected to the grid, they could take over that role and become a revenue generator for owners.  When the grid needs it, it could take a little out of the cars, and then put it back later when demands declines.

Electric cars have “a very, very high value to the grid,” Huber told MSNBC.

So how much are those cars worth?

A small study out of the University of Delaware using converted electric Scions (E-Boxes) having 17 kwh batteries plugged in an average of 21.5 hours per day yielded around $300 per month per driver.

The cost of these conversions and their very low volume don’t play a useful role on the grid today, but if the Obama pledge of 1 million plug-in cars by 2015 comes true, V2G ould easily become a very important value proposition for would be buyers.

Our friend Tony Posawatz, Volt vehicle line director, explained to MSNBC that GM is planning for this functionality  in the next generation of Chevy Volts.

“We’re going to make this asset (the battery) available to plug in all the time to collect the energy created by this green technology,” Posawatz told MSNBC.

Posawatz is also banking on the fact that Volt batteries will be used as grid buffers after they have served their 10 year vehicular lifetime.

“We believe the battery will have a life outside the car,” he said.

The current high expenses of lithium-ion batteries to consumers still obviate their financial benefit, but in time as costs go down a threshold will be crossed.

“How can we quickly move down the cost curve and get the technological advances going?” said Posawatz.  ”Certainly the automotive industry does not move as quickly as the telecommunications industry. … Can we make that kind of progress on a shorter time scale?”

Source (msnbc)

There is ample evidence that the US electricity grid can handle substantial numbers of electric cars. A study by EPRI and the NRDC determined that there is enough excess capacity to assimilate up to 50 million electric cars with out building any more capacity, assuming charging is done at night.

Some automakers and other stakeholders are concerned not so much with this big picture, but are concerned about smaller sections of the grid

Bill Reinert is Toyota’s outspoken national manager of advanced technology.

In an interview with Autoblog, he predicted that plugin cars “are going to cluster by ZIP code.”

“The Prius has…all hybrids cluster by ZIP code and you can assume that EVs will cluster by ZIP code,” he said. “They tend to cluster in affluent neighborhoods.”

The problem as Reinert sees it is that those affluent neighborhoods where most early adopters live contain older homes with older local electricity and transformer infrastructure.

“A lof of these neighborhoods…have undersized transformers,” he said.

He believes this highly focused high intensity electric demand could spell disaster.

“You can have a situation where you have three electric cars on the same transformer and all start charging at the same time on Level 2, 220-volt charging and you can bring down the transformer,” said Reinert.

Britta Gross who is GM’s director of infrastructure doesn’t exactly agree.

“I’m just as concerned about clusters of plasma screen TVs, air conditioners, pool heaters, etc,” she said. “This is what utilities do…they make sure that the electric grid keeps up with load growth in their communities.”

“The good news is that large numbers of plasma screen TVs and PEVs don’t get installed in a single night and surprise the utilities – the load growth happens over a time frame in which utilities can respond,” she said.

I am a lifelong new Yorker, born in the Bronx.  It is important to me for my state and city to play a leading role in our country’s exodus from the gasoline-powered automobile.

Part of my effort has been to meet with utility company and government officials to help find and promote ways to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles.

In December I attended a stakeholder meeting at Con Edison (NYC’s utility co) headquarters in Manhattan which was coordinated by Britta Gross, GMs director of infrastructure.  The intention of the inaugural meeting was to see what is needed to get New York City ready for plugin vehicles.

Earlier this week a report was issued by Mayor Bloomberg’s office as part of what is known as the PlaNYC initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 60% by 2030 and ensure a sustainable city.  The report looked specifically about how electric vehicles would be adopted by New York City.  It was created by McKinsey and Company.

There were 6 major findings:

1.  There is a large early adopter group in NYC who are willing to making lifestyle changes to be able to own electric cars

2.  The early adopters’ demand will outstrip supply for at least 5 years.  14 to 16% of all new vehicle purchases in NYC from 2010 to 2015 are expected to be electric cars.

3.  Policies should be developed to help early adopters enter the market

4.  Early adopters will not require high density public charging nor special tax incentives

5.  The expected level of EV adoption will not threaten the stability of NYC’s electric grid, as the early adopters expect to charge at night

6.  Automakers and utilities have an opportunity to prepare for and  enourgage EV adoption over the next 5 years.

For those that like math, 16% of all cars purchased by New York City amounts to 70,000 electric cars over the next 5 years.

It looks like New York is ready for the Volt, is GM ready for us?

[NYC Electric Vehicle Adoption Study 2010, PDF]

GM is hosting a plug-in ready panel discussion in downtown LA.  I will be there for the discussion.

It is led by Chevrolet vice president Brent Dewar and includes representatives from utility companies, local governments and other stakeholders.

Live webcast is below, and you can submit questions too:

Once in a while an epic Volt story is published in the media.  Such is the 6000 word piece penned by Bernard Avishai for Inc. magazine.

The Volt is described in truly revolutionary terms not just for its ability to drive without oil or how it would be a halo car for GM but more importantly how it forms the centerpiece of an explosively growing suite of industries.

It is explained how people will seek electric cars primarily for cost savings once gas goes over $3 per gallon.

“At that level,” GM VP Jon Lauckner tells the author, “the cost of running a Volt in full electric mode will be about one-sixth that of a gas-driven car of the same size, 2 or 3 cents a mile rather than 12 to 15 cents a mile. We figured that, for most people, this means a savings of about $1,500 a year.”  The value of range anxiety reduction is also described as giving the Volt an advantage over competitors such as the Nissan LEAF.

A very critical and perhaps more important success factor with tremendous national impact though will be the interaction with the Volt and the grid

An executive from utility company Duke Power is quoted as saying, “if every American home had a Volt, he says, total power usage in the country would increase only about 10 percent.”  His company and many others are developing the tools to handle this and more importantly to achieve ideal load distribution so that charging isn’t done simultaneously by many cars at peak times.

The Volt will be smart enough to program time of charging in, but it is perhaps more important that utility companies be able to read the demand of all the country’s electric cars concurrently and be able to manage the charging elegantly.  The elements to obtain this orchestration of supply and demand to the benefit of all parties is beginning to emerge.

This is the rapid transformational growth stemming from the electrification of the automobile that is upon us, akin to the Internet of the early 90s.  Many startups are forming to deal with this new network of the smart electric car and smart gird interface.  As an early mover, GM has the chance for tremendous future success.

Our friend Volt executive Tony Posawatz was quoted as saying “our urgent challenge is to become the leading integrator of the sustainable transportation-energy ecosystem — to control the intellectual property governing the integration of the battery to the car and the car to the grid.”  The author translates what Tony is really saying is:

If GM plays its cards right, it could well incubate, and own, the new industry’s crucial operating and telecommunications standards, the anchors for thousands of smaller technology companies supporting the electric car’s components, information, and entertainment and charging needs.

Beyond the explosive growth of the lithium battery industry fueled by government loans and grants and A123’s IPO, GM has its own internal plans for future battery advances.

Former executive Bob Kruse explains that GM’s 3rd generation Volt battery will use non-liquid solid-state cells that have twice the energy density and half the cost. GM’s close collaborator Ann Marie Sastry at the U. of Michigan who has founded the battery start-up Sastry3 is apparently working on developing such cells.

“Liquid electrolytes present integration limits — also limits on energy density. We think that disruptive manufacturing techniques can improve performance dramatically, as in the chip industry.” Sastry said. “We aim to create a cheap, scalable process.”

Another electric car-induced industry will be for battery packs that have passed their vehicular lifetime but still have 75% storage capacity.

“It is easy to imagine warehouses full of used batteries sucking up wind energy and saving it for times the wind does not blow, or homeowners using the pack as backup,” said Pozawatz.

Home and public charging station companies will also proliferate. Highlighted is California start-up Coulomb Technologies who is pioneering the networked EV charging industry. The company’s CEO is former Cisco executive Richard Lowenthal who explains how networking software is the key to his company’s product.

“The key to our infrastructure and our venture funding is our network software applications,” said Lowenthal. “Our chargers are smart enough to consolidate payment from subscribers to all the various power companies, or tell drivers over their phones where they can find incentive pricing, and so forth.”

Software development is also a crucial new industry representing the brain of the Volt; choosing how to balance generator and battery ouptut against rapidly changing load demands from both the road and driver.

Furthermore, ensuring the car is able to communicate outward to the grid, service providers and the Internet is very important in the Volt. Here GM holds a fearsome advantage over its competitors by owing OnStar which as we know will be deeply knitted into the Volts operating system.

“We are focusing on the car and building in the capacity to roll up charging data, which can be placed at the door of the power company,” said Posawatz.

The killer app though could be supplied by a company called GridPoint that will supply the link between the electric car and the utility grid, allowing the utility companies to comprehend and act on the information provided by many thousands of electric cars like the Volt

“We see companies like GridPoint managing what utilities do with data behind the door, providing back to our drivers the charging, billing, and other services that will maximize the cost effectiveness and environment benefit of owning an electric vehicle,” said Posawatz

All of these new industries that the Volt represent a starting point for are also being subsidized by government in the way of the billions of dollars of loans and stimulus money already supplied by the Obama administration, guaranteeing their success.

As this story compellingly tells, we have arrived at a truly transformational point in history for the country, the economy, society, and the environment, and sitting right at the heart of it all is none other than the Chevy Volt.

Source (Inc)