A Volt outside GM's headquarters in Detroit. Credit: Flickr / Landlessness.

Electric vehicle enthusiasts (and critics) are keeping a close eye on sales of GM’s Volt this year to get a sense of whether electric vehicles will really finally catch on. GM has said that it hopes to sell 30,000 Volts in 2012, which would mean selling, on average 2,500 a month. It’s far short of that pace for January having sold just 603.

The January figure markedly down from December, when GM delivered 1,520. But sales were actually up substantially from the same time last year, when GM sold 321 of the cars—however, at that time, the Volt was only available in a few states. 

GM didn’t meet its goal of selling 10,000 Volts during 2011, for a number of reasons. In fact, it’s still short of 10,000, with total deliveries of 8,600 vehicles since sales began at the end of 2010.

So, do slow sales in January mean GM won't reach its goal?

There are a number of factors that could explain the slow January sales. Customers hoping to get the Federal tax credit for the car for the 2011 tax year may have rushed to buy in December. Also, at the beginning of January, GM announced a retrofit that will make the car safer. The cars on the lots in January (about 4,400 were there at the beginning of the month) were not retrofitted yet, and the parts needed to do the retrofits weren't widely available. So anyone buying a car in January would have to take it back in a month or two to have the changes made. GM also announced in January that cars built later this year would have low enough emissions to qualify for driving in California’s HOV lanes, an attractive perk.

All in all, potential customers had a lot of reasons to wait until later this year to buy a Volt. It’s too early to call whether the company could sell 30,000 this year. It’s also too early to say how important sales of the Volt are, at least in terms of the overall prospects for electric vehicles. But I’d be interested to hear what readers think. How much is riding on the success of the Volt this year?

Credit: Whitehouse.gov, Pete Souza

President Obama seems to have a newfound love of oil.

In his State of the Union Address last night, he emphasized the development of domestic energy supplies, particularly oil and natural gas, but also solar and wind power. 

Although he called on Congress to pass legislation creating a clean energy standard, as he did last year, it was clear that he's focusing on supporting clean energy by doing things within his administration that don't require Congressional support.  

Last year Obama mentioned the word "oil" twice, the first time to call for the United States to end its dependence on it, and the second time to call for funding clean energy development by decreasing tax breaks for oil companies.

This year he mentioned oil nine times (10 if you include a reference to a regulation that categorized cow milk as an oil). Gone was any sense that oil was an addiction, as his predecessor George Bush had called it, or something the United States had to reduce its dependence on. He praised the fact that the U.S. produced more oil last year than it had for eight years, and he said that he is opening more areas for offshore drilling. When he called for the development of alternatives to oil, his reason was that we just don't have enough of it in the United States. 

Although Obama sounded supportive of oil, he did call for an end to subsidies for oil companies and for Congress to "double down" incentives for clean energy. He also said he would continue efforts to make sure oil companies can contain oil spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico. 

Last year, Obama said that U.S. oil dependency could be broken by turning to biofuels and electric vehicles. He didn't mention either this year. This is in spite of the fact that progress has been made on both fronts. 

Last year was the first full year of sales for new electric cars from GM and Nissan, and several more automakers will start selling electric vehicles this year. The first commercial cellulosic ethanol plants could also start operation this year. Sales of electric vehicles, however, have been slower than expected. And, by now, cellulosic ethanol plants were supposed to have been making hundreds of millions of gallons of ethanol, according to a federal mandate.

While Obama didn't mention electric vehicles, he did talk about high-tech batteries, saying that the U.S. is "positioned" to become the leading manufacturer of these batteries. Presumably, he's referring to electric car batteries and the large factories for making them that the government has subsized. The U.S. certainly is building a lot of battery factories. But it will be difficult for a new U.S. battery industry to compete with the established battery industry in Asia, and in any case, the success of the new factories will largely depend upon sales of electric vehicles increasing dramatically.

If Obama's biggest emphasis last year was on biofuels and electric cars, this year it was on natural gas. He praised domestic natural gas as a resource that is both clean and cheap, and he said that exploiting it could employ 600,000 jobs by 2020. He didn't say how many of those would be new jobs.

Although Obama praised natural gas, he didn't mention any specific support for the industry. Indeed, his only pledge was that he would regulate it, requiring companies to disclose the chemicals they use in the fracking process for extracting natural gas from shale.

Some support for natural gas could come from the clean energy standard—in lieu of a cap and trade system for reducing carbon dioxide emissions—that Obama asked Congress to pass last year, and again this year. The standards would have supported natural gas over coal, since burning it emits about half the carbon dioxide emissions as coal. 

Although Obama mentioned the clean energy standard, that's not really where he focused his attention last year. Instead, he's been working to push forward clean energy by means that don't require Congressional approval, such as new EPA limits on power plant pollution and tougher fuel economy standards. He spoke of working without the support of Congress in his speech, declaring that his administration would allow more construction of clean energy on federal lands, and that the U.S. Department of Defense would increase its use of clean energy sources. Expect Obama to continue this strategy, especially in an election year, when Congress is expected to get even less done.

What with the constant stream of advertising about electric vehicles, you'd think that they are gaining ground against conventional cars with internal combustion engines. Not so.

For every Chevrolet Volt GM sold last year, it sold 54 Silverado pickups, according to sales figures released on Wednesday. Chevrolet increased its sales of gas powered cars by 200,000 units from last year, compared to the mere 7,671 Volts sold. These figures don't include increasing sales of vehicles overseas. The number of gas-powered cars on the road is going up far faster than the number of electric vehicles.

A similar story holds true for renewable energy and fossil fuels. So far, the efforts that have gone into building solar panels and wind turbines haven't decreased worldwide fossil fuel use. That continues to grow. At best, they've slowed the rate of growth. (See page 28 of this report.)