After Bob Lutz made the announcement about the deal to work with A123 Systems on the cells for the Chevy Volt battery packs to be supplied by Continental, AutoblogGreen sat down to chat with GM's battery chief Denise Grey. Denise is responsible for the battery development work on all of GM's hybrid and electric programs.

AutoblogGreen: I'm here with Denise Grey who is the director of Energy Storage Systems at General Motors and you're in charge of all the battery development for hybrids and electric vehicles?

Denise Grey: That's right.

ABG: Why don't we start off by talking a little bit about the announcement that Bob Lutz made this morning about A123 Systems and GM.

DG: Okay. To put it in perspective, we've got two contracts that we announced back in the May timeframe for the Chevy Volt E-Flex System; one was LG Chem with Compact Power. Compact Power's a subsidiary of LG Chem, and that in essence covers the cells as well as the pack. The other thing in May we announced Continental which is our pack supplier. Today's announcement kind of completes the four quadrants for the cells – A123 will be providing cells to Conti for their particular system, so in essence we complete the four-piece partnership. A123 brings that nano-phosphate technology, their lithium ion chemistry to the forefront and by working with them we can understand specifically how that chemistry works, how do we create the battery state estimation protocol so that we can in essence control that system effectively. We're already doing that with Compact Power and now this gives us that additional insight from a nano-phosphate lithium ion perspective.

Continue reading Denise Grey's answers after the jump.