Kyle Roerink’s recent “Writers on the Range” opinion (“A dangerous game of chicken on the Colorado River”) reminds one of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1983 caution in a Washington Post op-ed: “Everyone is entitled to…
Kyle Roerink’s recent “Writers on the Range” opinion (“A dangerous game of chicken on the Colorado River”) reminds one of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1983 caution in a Washington Post op-ed: “Everyone is entitled to…
Navajo Generating Station shut down in 2019 and is now being dismantled. The Colorado River water that cooled the plant is part of a broader legal impasse.
The three smokestacks at Navajo Generating Station were demolished on December 18, 2020. Photo courtesy of Salt River Project
By Brett Walton, Circle of Blue
An emblem of coal power in the United States and a symbol of coal’s tight bond with water is being dismantled, piece by piece.
Navajo Generating Station was the largest coal-fired power plant in the American West, a testament to the political bargaining generations ago that divvied up the region’s land, minerals, and water. But the facility’s time is now up. In November 2019, the power plant stopped producing electricity. In December 2020, the trio of 775-foot smokestacks came tumbling down. Six weeks ago, the precipitators that prevented fine coal particles from being emitted into the air were dynamited, crumbling to the desert floor like felled beasts.