PHOENIX (AP) - Owners of a coal-fired power plant in northern Arizona are expected to vote Monday on its future, considering options that include a possible closure within a few years.
The Navajo Generating Station’s plant’s operator, the Salt River Project, has said closing the plant in Page near the Arizona-Utah line is a possibility because less expensive power generated by burning natural gas is available.
The SRP is one of the plant’s owners, along with Tucson Electric Power Co., Arizona Public Service Co., Nevada-based NV Energy and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation.
The owners’ planned Monday telephone meeting was first reported by the Arizona Republic (https://goo.gl/NS1vek ).
Options under consideration include asking the Navajo Nation for an extension of the current lease now set to expire Dec. 22, 2019 and keeping the plant in operation until that date before decommissioning it, SRP spokesman Scott Harelson said Wednesday.
Decommissioning the plant could involve dissembling and removing the equipment, a process expected to take at least two years.
Harelson said talks are underway with Navajo officials about how a decommissioning would take place. “We can do whatever the Nation prefers or desires…”
Navajo and Hopi tribal officials have said they want the plant’s owners to consider the impact a closure of the plant and a coal mine that supplies the plant would have on the tribes and their revenue. Each operation provides hundreds of jobs.
Harelson said he could not discuss SRP’s position but he said it’d take a unanimous vote by the owners and agreement by the Navajo Nation to extend the lease.
Harelson said the Bureau of Reclamation won’t be voting during the meeting. Rose Davis, a spokeswoman for the agency’s Lower Colorado Region, did not immediately return calls for comment.
The bureau uses power from plant to pump Colorado River water through the Central Arizona Project aqueduct system to farms, cities and tribes in central and southern Arizona, and a bureau official said it recognizes that the plant is “an economic driver” for much of the state.
The bureau prefers that the plant continuing operation at least through the current lease’s term, Deputy Commissioner David Palumbo said in a statement. “We are equally committed to exploring ways in which the plant could operate economically post-2019.”
NV Energy has said it plans to cut its ties with the plant in order to meet a 2013 Nevada mandate for reduced reliance on coal-fired power generation, but Harelson said the owners’ current re-assessment is being driven by economics, “not environmental or regulatory issues.”
The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced in 2014 that the plant could either shut down one of its three 750-megawatt units or reduce power generation by an equal amount by 2020 to cut haze-causing pollution at places like the Grand Canyon.
Additional emission control equipment would be needed by 2030 on the two remaining units.
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