Arizona’s Navajo Generating Station Coal Plant Has Permanently Shut Down
From this article: The Navajo Generating Station, located near the Arizona-Utah border, has officially shut down after using the last of its coal, according to a Monday press release. The NGS was a 2,250-megawatt plant that is owned by SRP, Arizona Public Service Co., Nevada Energy and Tucson Electric Power. It was determined in 2017 that the station was “uneconomical” to continue operations, according to officials. They argued that the plant polluted the air and caused health problems in communities nearby.
This seems like a strange way to put it. Don’t all coal plants “pollute the air and cause health problems in communities nearby?” If that were a legitimate basis on which to close every one, it would have already happened.
Fortunately however, the “uneconomical” part is a big deal. We are strongly motivated to spend as little as possible for our commodities, and coal can no longer compete effectively, in the U.S. at least, with renewables and natural gas. There are places where the wholesale price of electricity from wind is 1.3 cents per kWh.
It’s only a matter of time until solar and wind scale to the point that coal is a relic of the past. Moreover, that period of time will shorten to the degree that we place value on human health. Here’s a radical idea: let’s price in the cost of treating the lung disease that is a direct result of the operation of the coal plants. For the moment, forget all about the long-term environmental damage. The Harvard Medical School pegs the public health costs in the Appalachian region alone at $75 billion annually, that puts the total hidden costs at about $500 billion.
Coal will be gone the very moment the gavel drops and such legislation passes.
Craig,
Why are you celebrating plunging already disadvantaged native Americans into even greater poverty and despair ?
The Navajo Generating Station, Railway and mine was the only source of income for nearly 4700 people. The loss of this income makes the entire community uneconomic and will over time loss all amenities the NGS once provided.
What will provide revenue for schools, roads, health centres, clinics, retirement facilities? What with happen to local government as the tax base shrinks and the town becomes a ghost town of elderly poverty stricken forgotten relics of the past?
As trucks out on the highway replace the unique Navajo Railway,and more Navajo culture dies away, dissipates and is forgotten with the drift of young people to large cities, who will celebrate your cruel and ignorant ‘victory’?
The Power station is not closing due to replacement by renewable “wind and power”,that’s just a cruel lie!
The aging power plant can’t compete with another fossil fuel, Natural Gas.
But mostly, the NGS which was always a marginally economic generating plant simply can’t attract the sort of investment needed to update the plant to a ‘clean coal’ resource.
Yet the ‘owner’ was the federal government!
The plant suffered from years of attack from the Obama administration that discouraged investment and wasted billions on subsidized alternate energy.
The health and environmental concerns are also based on lies and disingenuous propaganda.
Like all technology, coal fired power station have also evolved. Modern coal fired power stations emit no harmful environmental or health emissions, in fact, to the contrary, Coal is the only fuel which can used with in a demonstrably environmentally positive result.
Meanwhile, this is no victory against coal, as China’s production in September 2019 was 2.1% higher than it was in 2018.
Chinese production and usage include the output from new new mines opened only last year ramping up production to meet high winter demand.
Due to domestic gas supply shortages in recent years, China has quietly ceased displacing coal heating with natural gas.
China approved nearly $6.7 billion worth of new coal mining projects in 2018. Production increased 5.2% to 3.55 billion tonnes domestically while coal imports by China increased 9% last year.
Coal supplies about 60% of China’s total energy supply and generates 65% of total electricity.
There is no “war” on Coal in China which has concentrated on dealing with removing and harnessing harmful emissions rather than simply pursuing a short sighted policy of “leaving coal in the ground”, while depleting natural gas reserves.
China is in fierce competition with India to capture the world Coal fired generation market.
Between them they will leave the US an isolated technological industrial backwater unable to compete with advanced energy technology requirements.
NGS has 538 employees, and pays about $52 million per year in total wages, indirectly the NGS brought another $129 million in income to the region.
The 1,786 acres for the plant site is leased from the Navajo Nation.
Rights-of-way and easements on tribal lands, permitted under a 25 U.S.C. §323 grant, include the plant site, 78 miles of railroad right-of-way covering 1,309 acres, and 96 miles of transmission line right-of-way covering 3,850 acres.
Property taxes paid to the State of Arizona are about $4.8 million per year. Payments in lieu of taxes have also been paid to the Navajo Nation at half the Arizona tax rate, or about $2.4 million per year.
In addition, Annual lease payments to the Navajo Nation were $808,000 along with income from Air permit fees paid to the Navajo Nation own local EPA are about $400,000 per year.
The Obama administration made no provision (apart from welfare) to replace this income.
Nor did the Obama administration make any provision for maintaining water supply to the surrounding Navajo lands which will be cut off and force great environmental damage to the ares.
The Trump administration has scrambled together a plan to continue water supply and subsidize the cost but without the plant the cost will be borne by the US taxpayer.
The tragedy of this whole mess is the plant could have been turned into a showpiece of environmental progress and huge prosperity if it hadn’t been for the dishonesty and ideological prejudice of the Obama EPA.
In 2013 the Navajo nation wanted to buy the plant and raise the money from the DoE to modernize both the mine and the plant to the highest standard of clean coal technology.
The Obama administration covertly prevented the DoE from approving the plan and the EPA continually changed the rules and requirements to create false and exaggerated costs.
By the time the Trump administration was elected, the permits had already been issued to natural gas utilities and the NGS would have needed an act of Congress to revive the plant.
The Trump administration had such act planned but the loss of the lower house and the obvious lack of support for such a plan by the Democrat controlled lower house killed the proposal.
The rusting wreak of the NGS, the Navajo nation, the city and county of page stand as a cruel symbol of the Obama government’s hypocrisy and willingness to sacrifice marginal people and US interests to ill-conceived, fashionable ideology.
Oh,and about those health concerns you are so worried about?
It appears the EPA and Harvard University assessments were not only inaccurate, but based on lies and bias.
The original report “added” figures from other locations as if samples from local monitoring sites to produce false figures for the NGS.
In fact, for an old power plant, the newly installed pollution controls worked surprisingly well.
Subsequent surveys reveal Coconino County’s peak concentrations in Page to be more than 10 percent lower than the national average.
Nitrogen dioxide levels in the Page area average about 3 ppb, 94 percent lower than the NAAQS standard of 53 ppb. Carbon monoxide (CO) levels have also been far below the standards.
Fine particulate levels in the Grand Canyon region have been among the lowest in the nation since NGS completed installation of SO2 scrubbers and low NOx-SOFA burners.
Annual mean levels for PM2.5 in the Page area are about 3 micrograms/cubic meter (µg/m3) ( one quarter of the NAAQS standard of 12 µg/m3).
This is as low, or lower, than the cleanest U.S. cities listed by the World Health Organization.
The EPA withheld the figures until 2017 when a freedom of information request was approved by the Trump administration.
The Hopi people and the City of Page will bravely try to re-invent their lives and lost income, but only at great cost.
Their once prosperous and vibrant community faces hardship and the threat of decay, unemployment and dislocation.
I wish the Hopi, the good folk of Page and Coconino County, Arizona well in the future. I thank them for their kind hospitality and empathize with their resentment and anger toward those who so willfully betrayed them.
This is not a time for gloating, there is no “triumph”, just another casualty to deceptive political ideology.