In New Mexico, along the Navajo’s eastern border, two plants and two mines face a tenuous future. The Cholla Power Plant in Joseph City, Ariz., just south of the Navajo Nation, is scheduled to close in 2025. Like many coal communities across America, the Navajo are now being forced to reckon with a future without the fossil fuel. ![]() But there is also a pervasive feeling among tribal members, including strong supporters of coal, that the Navajo bore the environmental costs while others enjoyed the benefits of the coal industry ( Climatewire, April 3, 2017).Ĭoal mined and burned on and near the Navajo reservation has helped power the growth of Phoenix, Los Angeles and Las Vegas-but some 15,000 tribal members remain without electricity today. On the one hand, the industry has provided high-paying jobs and tax revenue on a reservation in desperate need of both. “I think that’s something that we can’t really walk away from immediately."Ĭoal has long been something of a paradox for the Navajo. For almost the last hundred years, the nation-which I mean the Navajo Nation-has been one of the leading forms of energy, not only in the Southwest, but west of the Mississippi," said Seth Damon, speaker of the Navajo Nation Council, in an interview. It’s unclear just how many jobs that wind and solar can create to replace the more than a thousand tribal jobs in the coal industry. Tribal officials are projecting up to $35 million in budget cuts in 2021, the result of closing a massive plant and coal mine later this year. Navajo renewable developers talk of a second chance to reap the riches of the energy industry. Tribal leaders are increasingly looking to wind and solar to fill the gap left by the fossil fuel. The wave of retirements represents a watershed moment for the Navajo and a test case for America’s wider transition away from coal. And the fourth faces growing uncertainty, as one of its owners plans to divest from the plant in 2031. The fate of the third rests upon a longshot bid to keep it open beyond 2022. Two of the four plants are scheduled to close by 2025. ![]() Today, the tribe could draw a line around its reservation with coal.įour coal-fired power plants and three coal mines ring the Navajo Nation, a testament to the black rock’s complicated legacy on a sprawling reservation that occupies large swaths of high desert in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah.īut coal’s days in Navajo country are increasingly numbered. Army in the mid-1800s, four mountains marked the boundary of the Navajo’s ancestral homeland.
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