Navajo Generating Station
After Horseshoe Bend, we went to find a place where we could actually get down to Lake Powell. This took us back past the Navajo Generating Station coal-fired power plant. We'd already driven past that once when we first came into Page. Now we were going past it again.
Here's some details about the Navajo Generating Station. The station's origins lie with the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the big irrigation project Arizona managed to wrangle from the Federal Government and the rest of the Colorado Basin states in 1968. The purpose of the CAP was to pump a bunch of Colorado River water down to the southern end of the state so farmers could grow alfalfa in 104° heat. But pumping all that water from the river to Phoenix was going to take a lot of electricity, and the state needed to get that from someplace. Of course, there was already all that hydroelectric power produced at Glen Canyon Dam, but I guess that was already spoken for. Some folks planned a couple of hydroelectric projects in tributary gorges at the Grand Canyon, but the National Park Service and all that new brand of hippie environmentalists wasn't having that. So they came up with this instead.
This is three coal-fired generators that came online in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Collectively, these generators can produce a whopping 2.25 gigwatts of power. That's almost enough to send a DeLorean back to the future twice. And if you have enough power to break the time-space continuum, you sure as hell have enough to spread a bunch of water over the southern Arizona desert. So they sold whatever they didn't need to pump water to three municipal utilities in Arizona, one in Nevada, and the City of Los Angeles, California.
As I've said, all this power came from that Kayenta Coal Mine I was talking about earlier, carted here from the terminal on US 160 in a continuous stream by that electric train. Over the course of a normal year, this plant would burn about 8 million tons of that coal. In exchange, it would release about 4,600 tons of sulphur dioxide, 20,000 tons of various nitrogen oxides, and 18.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. Which is a lot of carbon dioxide. It almost makes me want to protest or something.
Except now I don't have to. We happened to drive past this plant at a momentous point in its history, as it was at this very moment in the process of shutting down for good. It would generate its last watt of commercial power three days after I took this picture. After 45 years, the Navajo Generating Station was closing up shop.
I'll talk more about this later in the trip pictures, but that probably won't happen until after the holidays.
Navajo Generating Station
After Horseshoe Bend, we went to find a place where we could actually get down to Lake Powell. This took us back past the Navajo Generating Station coal-fired power plant. We'd already driven past that once when we first came into Page. Now we were going past it again.
Here's some details about the Navajo Generating Station. The station's origins lie with the Central Arizona Project (CAP), the big irrigation project Arizona managed to wrangle from the Federal Government and the rest of the Colorado Basin states in 1968. The purpose of the CAP was to pump a bunch of Colorado River water down to the southern end of the state so farmers could grow alfalfa in 104° heat. But pumping all that water from the river to Phoenix was going to take a lot of electricity, and the state needed to get that from someplace. Of course, there was already all that hydroelectric power produced at Glen Canyon Dam, but I guess that was already spoken for. Some folks planned a couple of hydroelectric projects in tributary gorges at the Grand Canyon, but the National Park Service and all that new brand of hippie environmentalists wasn't having that. So they came up with this instead.
This is three coal-fired generators that came online in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Collectively, these generators can produce a whopping 2.25 gigwatts of power. That's almost enough to send a DeLorean back to the future twice. And if you have enough power to break the time-space continuum, you sure as hell have enough to spread a bunch of water over the southern Arizona desert. So they sold whatever they didn't need to pump water to three municipal utilities in Arizona, one in Nevada, and the City of Los Angeles, California.
As I've said, all this power came from that Kayenta Coal Mine I was talking about earlier, carted here from the terminal on US 160 in a continuous stream by that electric train. Over the course of a normal year, this plant would burn about 8 million tons of that coal. In exchange, it would release about 4,600 tons of sulphur dioxide, 20,000 tons of various nitrogen oxides, and 18.6 million tons of carbon dioxide. Which is a lot of carbon dioxide. It almost makes me want to protest or something.
Except now I don't have to. We happened to drive past this plant at a momentous point in its history, as it was at this very moment in the process of shutting down for good. It would generate its last watt of commercial power three days after I took this picture. After 45 years, the Navajo Generating Station was closing up shop.
I'll talk more about this later in the trip pictures, but that probably won't happen until after the holidays.