General Motors – the lumbering, money-losing giant of American industry – will formally unveil the Chevy Volt tomorrow to celebrate its 100th anniversary. The event, though, will mark more than a new car for GM and a triple-digit anniversary. It will set the stage for a turn in the balance of power in the automotive business. The Volt won't start reaching consumers until late 2010. The initial reaction and test drives among customers will be more crucial than what gets said tomorrow. But the public will get a formal look at the car and get some technical details. These will be hashed out and some consensus or momentum may begin to emerge. If the Volt lives up to its promises, it will serve as a wake up call to the large Japanese automakers. GM has been the principal proponent among large manufacturers of plug-in hybrids. Plug-ins can be charged from wall sockets. They get better mileage than regular hybrids and nearly the same mileage under average daily driving conditions as fully electric cars. Because the Volt will drive the first 40 miles on electricity and most Americans only drive about 26 miles a day, these cars will function effectively as electric cars. Mass manufactured plug-ins, though, are expected to cost only about $6,000 or so more than standard hybrids when coming out in volume and tens of thousands less than equivalent all-electric cars. The Volt is initially expected to cost close to $40,000. That's a good $16,000 over the cost of a low-end Prius right now, but the Prius has been in volume production for several years. Toyota has sold more than 1.6 million hybrids to date. Toyota, Nissan and Honda are building plug-ins as well, but clearly GM has done its homework. If it got the Volt right, the company won't be a laggard in a key market anymore. Motor Trend also reports that Opel and Vauxhall, two GM brands, will come out with series hybrids like the Volt in 2010 too. Thus, it will be a global assault. Success also means bad news for all of those electric car startups like Tesla Motors. While some of these companies plan to concentrate only on high-end electric sports cars, some (like Tesla) plan to get into the sedan market. It's going to beat GM on price, market penetration and advertising. But if it doesn't live up to billing, stockholders are going to really be asking questions and/or voting with their feet. GM has lost $57.5 billion in the last 18 months. The price will also need to be below $40,000 and GM will have to demonstrate how the price will decline in the coming years. If the Volt doesn't cut it, the future will be more bleak than the present for GM. We also might get a glimpse into the future of battery maker A123 Systems. GM said it has already decided on a battery maker for the Volt. The contest is down to two groups, one of which includes A123. If A123 is part of the winning bid, its coming IPO looks a lot better. GM owns around 5 percent of the company so they tend to be favored. If GM went with the other group, it could be a tough IPO to sell. We're not sure if they will release the name of the battery maker or not. But it will be something to listen for.

Hydrogen is easily the world's most maligned alternative fuel. The most common manufacturing process for it generates huge amounts of carbon dioxide. It is difficult to transport in conventional pipelines. Almost no fueling stations exists. And hydrogen fuel cells today continue to cost an outrageous amount. Critics far outnumber supporters and include noted researchers (Joe Romm),  respected CEOs (Sanjiv Malhotra) and former high-ranking government officials (Jim Woolsey). But hydrogen advocates aren't giving up. A report released this month from the Energy Information Administration points out some of the reasons why the proponents haven't completely thrown in the towel. And make no mistake: Hydrogen advocates are still serious. At Copenmind, a conference in Denmark this month, Toyota executive vice president Masatami Takimoto sounded more optimistic about hydrogen than all-electric cars with lithium batteries. The report, however, also indirectly underscores why hydrogen is such a long shot. In one part of the report, the authors hypothesize that hydrogen could cut fuel consumption better than plug-in hybrid vehicles and reduce petroleum consumption by 37.1 to 84.1 percent by 2050. Put another way, that's 11 percent to 78 percent lower than petroleum consumption in 1990. The estimates take into account fuel consumption from a wheel-to-wheel perspective but don't count transmission losses It sounds great until you realize that the figures assume a huge uptick in hydrogen car sales. To hit those figures, hydrogen cars will have to account for 50 percent to 100 percent of new car sales at midcentury. (To hit the 84 percent mark, hydrogen cars would have had to start accounting for all car sales in 2038. It's conceivable, but only under an Soylent Green-like apocalyptic future where everything else simply fails.) Will these arguments convince skeptics? Probably not and to the EIA's credit they don't skim over the challenges: It even acknowledges that the emergence of plug-ins represent a serious challenge to the viability of fuel cells. Still, it makes interesting reading and does provide some food for thought. Here are some of the highlights:

• Hydrogen right now plays a minuscule role in our energy budget. A little over 1 quadrillion BTUs of the gas get produceds in the U.S. a year. That's about 1 percent of our energy budget. Most of it gets bought by the petrochemical industry.

• There are 1,212 miles of hydrogen pipeline in the country, mostly circulating at above-mentioned chemical plants. By contrast, there are 295,000 miles of natural gas. In other words, the infrastructure is small. Standard pipelines, hypothetically, could carry a mix of gases that includes 20 percent hydrogen.

• There are only 63 hydrogen stations in the U.S. Twenty five are in California. Two-thirds of these are located in facilities where the gas can be generated. The rest need deliveries. Thus, it is even easier to find E85 right now: There were 1,400 ethanol stations at the beginning of the year. (By contrast, wall sockets for charging plug-in hybrids are pretty much everywhere.)

• Fuel cells themselves – the devices that harvest energy from hydrogen by stripping away electrons – need to fall below $30 or so a kilowatt for the hydrogen economy to take off. They now cost around $3,000 to $5,000 at kilowatt. (Put another way, those fancy hydrogen fuel cell SUVs GM is test driving cost over a million each.). But, the price could come down to $100 per kilowatt if a manufacturer started producing 500,000 a year.

• Current manufacturing costs range from $1.21 to $6.75 per kilogram.

• A fuel cell also only has half of the lifespan of a conventional engine.

• Compared to all that, plug-ins look a lot easier. A plug-in with a 40 mile all-electric range would use about 65 percent to 75 percent less gas than a regular car. The cost of the battery of a plug-in will be about one-third of the cost of a battery for an all-electric car with a 220 mile range. (With all that, you'd think the debate between plug-ins and fuel cells would end, but no.)

• Even if they went into mass production next year, neither plug-ins nor hydrogen cars would have much impact on the air quality or fuel consumption by 2030. The average car stays on the road 16 years so we've got a lengthy turnover cycle ahead, barring any unusual rebate programs like the ones former Intel CEO Andy Grove is touting for plug-ins. (There's another celebrity hydrogen skeptic.)

• But let's end on a high note. By 2050, progress on emissions and fuel consumption would begin to roll under a future dominated by plug-ins or fuel cells. Assuming intense market penetration, plug-ins could reduce energy consumption by 26.3 percent and petroleum consumption by 38 percent. Highly optimized fuel cells could cut energy by 35.3 percent and fuel consumption by 68.5 percent. Emissions reductions with plug-ins also fall short of some fuel cell scenarios.

Again, a long shot but an interesting debate.

We’ve had a great response to the Concentrated Photovoltaics (CPV) series:

Part One: High-Concentration PV Systems Part Two: Low-Concentration PV Systems Part Three: III-V Semiconductors for CPV Part Four: CPV Poetry Slam With Sunrgi

Here are some more items in the CPV vein: a few just announced funding rounds, a few CPV companies I somehow missed, and by popular demand, more CPV poetry from Sunrgi's KRS Murthy. Banyan Energy Offers Low-Concentration Module Banyan Energy, based in Berkeley, Calif. is a startup developing a set of optics to concentrate sunlight within a PV module. The company’s optics platform can be used to achieve concentration levels ranging from 2x up to 500x, seeking to deliver high performance, reliability, and manufacturability. Banyan’s first product is a low-concentration module. Whitfield Solar Harnesses Sun's Energy An astute reader brought U.K.-based CPV startup Whitfield Solar, to my attention. Spun out of Reading University, Whitfield Solar’s product uses an array of Fresnel lenses to concentrate the sun’s energy. Whitfield claims its initial product competes with flat-plate photovoltaic panels with lower cost, lower weight, lower embodied energy and lower-tech manufacturing processes. Whitfield’s initial products are silicon-based. Pyron Solar Gets Another $1 Million in Funding We did a brief profile of Pyron Solar in Part One (High-Concentration PV Systems). Pyron Solar builds a triple junction-based 2-axis HCPV system with arrays floating in water. It received $2 million in first round funding from New Energies Invest in 2007. Pyron just received another $1 million in a second closing of its Round A from NEI last week. The funding will finance a pilot demonstration of Pyron’s technology with a Southern California utility, according to Doug Carriger, the company’s CEO. Concentrator Optics, a CPV Lens Designer, Receives VC Funding Concentrator Optics is another player in the CPV ecosystem who received funding last week. Belgium-based VC Capricorn Venture Partners provided the undisclosed amount of funding to the German-based Fresnel lens firm. The market for solar Fresnel lenses is estimated to reach $280 million in 2011, according to the Capricorn press release. Concentrator Optics designs and produces Fresnel lenses for the CPV market. The company’s lenses are non-imaging Fresnel lenses assembled in large area parquets. According to the company, these can’t be designed or produced by the traditional smaller-dimension makers of imaging optical elements. We'll Leave You With Some Poetry From CPV Firm Sunrgi’s Founder, KRS Murthy

WAKE UP CALL Truth woke me up with an alarm with a very loud scream, big blow to my head throwing cold water on the face of my false dreams of the future. Dream that levitated my life Over the air lacking of oxygen Suffocating my brain of any logic. Can't go back to sleep, but not really awake