Kevin’s Daily Digest for 7/28/16

California burning, AES “repowering” gas plant with batteries, 9 ways the Gigafactory is driving change, NextEra’s strategic shift in wind, car sharing makes cities more livable, and more Water Cooler.

The Daily Digest, published Monday-Thursday plus a deep take weekend edition, focuses on the latest news and perspectives in climate, renewables, storage and electric vehicles. For more follow me on Twitter @kkchristy. The Digest archive and the rest of my Medium content is here.

As a native Californian, I’ve seen fire seasons and droughts come and go. But there is no denying that our environment has become more dangerous and hostile in recent years due to climate change.

Fire season has become almost year-round. Drought conditions have reached historic levels. Pine beetle devastation has skyrocketed. It is the worst of times, unless next year tops this year. Which seems to be the pattern.

Watching my home state parch and burn, with little cause for hope that conditions will improve, reinforces my conviction that we need to take daily action to stop this trend in its tracks. The next presidential election has perhaps never been so important.

AES plans to build a total of 300 MW of battery energy storage at its Alamitos plant in Long Beach, which is slated to be decommissioned. Given the existing interconnection infrastructure and permitted land, these kinds of projects are no-brainers. I have to think that we will see much more of this in the future.

SNL: NextEra repowering older wind plants, selling merchant plants.

Wind giant NextEra is taking something of a strategic shift, aiming to repower and recontract existing wind plants in Texas, while selling off certain merchant assets. Analysts are reacting with favor:

“We view the repowering opportunity as just another attractive avenue via which NEE can extend high single-digit EPS growth beyond 2018,” Wells Fargo Securities analysts said in a July 27 note.

“[NextEra Energy Resources LLC] development continues to drive growth, and repowering opportunity could be meaningful, but size of opportunity remains a question mark,” Guggenheim Securities LLC analysts said in a July 27 report.

Business Insider provides some eye-openers about Tesla’s expansion plans and the capacity goals of the gigafactory. Most striking for me is that Tesla’s plan to produce 500K cars per year in 2018 would put them ahead of Chrysler, Land Rover and Isuzu, and within striking distance of Volvo.

David Roberts of Vox has come back with another great piece on car-sharing services and why they have so much potential to improve living conditions in our cities.

In today’s Water Cooler discussion, I’m passing along some interesting reads: Why making iPhones in the U.S. might not cost as much as you think, what research tells us about losing our pets, and how a Detroit start-up is making inroads in the bike-sharing marketplace.