Stacks
Our way into and out of Antelope Canyon offered a view of the smoke stacks rising over the desert from the Navajo Generating Station, located very near the head of Antelope Canyon about 4 and a half miles from the point on the water were I took this picture.
This is where former Mayor Bill came closest to taking a partisan stand in the conversation, as he couldn't avoid talking about the plant and this unique moment in the plant's history as it finished up its third-to-last day of operations. Mayor Bill wasn't specific about his work history prior to being elected Mayor of Page, but he did say that he'd lived in Page for 40 years, and that he'd spent a lot of his career before politics working in the energy industry associated with this power plant. So this was a personal issue for him, and you could tell if you got very far into that conversation that he was a little bitter about the closure.
His main argument, which you'd expect, was economic. "That plant has provided 2,500 jobs for the people of Page and the Navajo and Hopi reservations," he said. "Page can make up some of that, because we have tourism. We have the lake. But those are service industry jobs that offer something close to minimum wage, trying to make up for career jobs that paid 40, 50 dollars an hour, plus benefits. You can't make up for that."
On top of that, Mayor Bill said, the power plant and its associated coal mine had brought an enormous amount of revenue to the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation through lease agreements and royalties. "The Navajo get about a third of their revenue from the plant," Mayor Bill said. "Now, they at least have some other sources of income, but the Hopi don't have anything. This plant is about 70 percent of their annual revenue. Imagine anybody trying to make up 70 percent of their income. You can't do it."
Mayor Bill said that the reason for all this was the shift in the economics of coal over the last decade, amplified by the environmentalist-driven push to move away from coal as an energy source. I've talked a lot about that over the years on this page. The advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) coupled with directional drilling revolutionized the natural gas extraction industry starting around 2009 or so, which led to a glut in natural gas production. Coal, meanwhile, is much more difficult to extract, as it involves either sending a bunch of people to go digging in expensive and technically demanding underground tunnels or blowing the tops off a bunch of mountains and moving an enormous amount of material. The bottom price to produce a BTU of gas is far, far lower than it is to produce a BTU of coal, and all forecasts suggest this gap is only going to increase. So, thanks to the simple physics of extraction, it made far more economic sense for energy companies and municipalities to shift from buying coal to buying gas. Coal demand started falling sharply at the start of the 2010s, and there's no sign of that trend reversing.
(I will point out to any potential Kentucky readers with a tendency to blame this on Obama-era regulation that this is called the "free market.")
At the same time, coal has also drawn the ire of people who understand atmospheric science and get what happens when you burn a lot of carbon and release the resulting gases into the air. The effects of climate change have become readily apparent to anybody who doesn't have a strong personal interest in not seeing them, and something like a giant coal power plant in the middle of the desert is an obvious target. It wasn't so much that the environmentalists dragged down the plant, though. They instead shifted the will of the plant's customers, specifically those down the river in the state of California. In 2018, the California legislature passed a bill banning the state from taking any power from any fossil fuel source by 2045. The City of Los Angeles was a part owner of this plant and one of its largest customers. Losing Los Angeles revenue was going to be a killer for this plant, so the owners decided to pack it in.
Mayor Bill was skeptical about how this would work out. "I don't see a state as large as California moving completely off fossil fuels in just a few years," he said. "That's an enormous demand for power, and it all has to come from somewhere. Where are they going to get it?"
The Mayor could only shrug. All he knew was that after the day after tomorrow, they wouldn't be getting it from here.
Stacks
Our way into and out of Antelope Canyon offered a view of the smoke stacks rising over the desert from the Navajo Generating Station, located very near the head of Antelope Canyon about 4 and a half miles from the point on the water were I took this picture.
This is where former Mayor Bill came closest to taking a partisan stand in the conversation, as he couldn't avoid talking about the plant and this unique moment in the plant's history as it finished up its third-to-last day of operations. Mayor Bill wasn't specific about his work history prior to being elected Mayor of Page, but he did say that he'd lived in Page for 40 years, and that he'd spent a lot of his career before politics working in the energy industry associated with this power plant. So this was a personal issue for him, and you could tell if you got very far into that conversation that he was a little bitter about the closure.
His main argument, which you'd expect, was economic. "That plant has provided 2,500 jobs for the people of Page and the Navajo and Hopi reservations," he said. "Page can make up some of that, because we have tourism. We have the lake. But those are service industry jobs that offer something close to minimum wage, trying to make up for career jobs that paid 40, 50 dollars an hour, plus benefits. You can't make up for that."
On top of that, Mayor Bill said, the power plant and its associated coal mine had brought an enormous amount of revenue to the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation through lease agreements and royalties. "The Navajo get about a third of their revenue from the plant," Mayor Bill said. "Now, they at least have some other sources of income, but the Hopi don't have anything. This plant is about 70 percent of their annual revenue. Imagine anybody trying to make up 70 percent of their income. You can't do it."
Mayor Bill said that the reason for all this was the shift in the economics of coal over the last decade, amplified by the environmentalist-driven push to move away from coal as an energy source. I've talked a lot about that over the years on this page. The advent of hydraulic fracturing (fracking) coupled with directional drilling revolutionized the natural gas extraction industry starting around 2009 or so, which led to a glut in natural gas production. Coal, meanwhile, is much more difficult to extract, as it involves either sending a bunch of people to go digging in expensive and technically demanding underground tunnels or blowing the tops off a bunch of mountains and moving an enormous amount of material. The bottom price to produce a BTU of gas is far, far lower than it is to produce a BTU of coal, and all forecasts suggest this gap is only going to increase. So, thanks to the simple physics of extraction, it made far more economic sense for energy companies and municipalities to shift from buying coal to buying gas. Coal demand started falling sharply at the start of the 2010s, and there's no sign of that trend reversing.
(I will point out to any potential Kentucky readers with a tendency to blame this on Obama-era regulation that this is called the "free market.")
At the same time, coal has also drawn the ire of people who understand atmospheric science and get what happens when you burn a lot of carbon and release the resulting gases into the air. The effects of climate change have become readily apparent to anybody who doesn't have a strong personal interest in not seeing them, and something like a giant coal power plant in the middle of the desert is an obvious target. It wasn't so much that the environmentalists dragged down the plant, though. They instead shifted the will of the plant's customers, specifically those down the river in the state of California. In 2018, the California legislature passed a bill banning the state from taking any power from any fossil fuel source by 2045. The City of Los Angeles was a part owner of this plant and one of its largest customers. Losing Los Angeles revenue was going to be a killer for this plant, so the owners decided to pack it in.
Mayor Bill was skeptical about how this would work out. "I don't see a state as large as California moving completely off fossil fuels in just a few years," he said. "That's an enormous demand for power, and it all has to come from somewhere. Where are they going to get it?"
The Mayor could only shrug. All he knew was that after the day after tomorrow, they wouldn't be getting it from here.