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Bloomberg
The view from the biggest coal plant in the US West is spectacular: red rock buttes and wide desert vistas that change color with the movement of the sun. Set against this backdrop, the station’s towering smoke stacks seem to disrupt the serenity of the landscape, its three concrete pillars spewing a perpetual stream of heat and gas.
For the Navajo and Hopi tribes nearby, it’s a disruption they can live with. For more than four decades, the Navajo generating station in the dusty Four Corners area of Arizona has been the region’s economic engine, generating jobs and vital government revenue along with 2,250 megawatts of power. Now its utility owners want to start the process of closing the plant as early as July. Their argument: Coal can’t compete with cheap natural gas. To save the plant and about 800 jobs linked to it, the Navajo and Hopi are taking their case to a higher power: A US president who’s vowed to revive the slumping coal industry. Tribal leaders met Wednesday with the Trump administration, the owners and other stakeholders in a final push to keep the generator running.
“It’s a linchpin of the Navajo and Hopi economy,†said Dan Dubray, a spokesman for the US Interior Department, which owns 24 percent of the plant and has a legal obligation to protect tribal assets and resources.
The battle to keep coal alive in an era of cheap natural gas is being fought across the nation, from West Virginia to Montana. It’s a debate in which the tribes have a significant stake. The Hopi’s 15,000 members derive 80 percent of their government revenue from coal mining royalties. For the Navajo, with 170,000 members, it’s 40 percent.
The generating station and the nearby Kayenta coal mine that feeds it each employs about 400 workers, and together they generate millions in economic activity. The mine, on both of the tribes’ lands, supplies coal to the plant — its only customer — via electric rail.
Nevertheless, keeping the plant open will be a tough sell. At a time when the feeble economics of coal-fired power are hard to dispute, the plant’s four utility owners — Salt River Project, Arizona Public Service Co., NV Energy Inc. and Tucson Electric Power Co. — are facing costly retrofits mandated by the US Environmental Protection Administration, including air-quality controls that must be in place by 2030.