Navajo Generating Station

For nearly forty-five years, three smokestacks rising seven hundred seventy-five feet above the Page mesa were visible from almost everywhere in the region: from the slot canyons, from Horseshoe Bend, from the rim of Lake Powell. They belonged to the Navajo Generating Station, the largest coal-fired power plant in the American West, with a generating capacity of two thousand two hundred fifty megawatts across three units commissioned in nineteen seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six. The plant sat on land leased from the Navajo Nation and consumed about eight million tons of coal each year from Peabody Energy's Kayenta Mine, located seventy-five miles to the south and connected by a dedicated railroad called the Black Mesa and Lake Powell Railroad.

The electricity powered customers across Arizona, Nevada, and California. Its most critical role was pumping: the Navajo Generating Station provided the power to lift Colorado River water through the Central Arizona Project, moving roughly one and a half million acre-feet per year uphill to Phoenix and Tucson. The closure was decided by economics.

By the mid-two thousand tens, natural gas and solar energy had become cheaper per kilowatt-hour than coal. The plant's utility owners announced in two thousand seventeen that they would not renew the lease when it expired. The plant went dark permanently on November eighteenth, two thousand nineteen.

About a thousand jobs were lost, and the Navajo Nation lost roughly forty million dollars in annual revenue. On December eighteenth, two thousand twenty, the three smokestacks were demolished, erasing the skyline feature that had defined the view from Page for nearly half a century.