Desert Rock Energy Project update
Power Plant on Navajo Land Takes Another Step Forward
By Ken Wright, 5-30-06
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The massive coal-fired power plant proposed for the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico has taken another step toward becoming reality after the Navajo Nation Council approved the project early this month, reports the Navajo Times. The council approved a 50-year business site lease for the Desert Rock Energy Project by a 66-7 vote in a special session on May 12.
The $2.5 billion plant would be built on 600 acres of rural reservation land south of Shiprock, N.M., near Farmington, and would generate 1,500 megawatts of electricity, which would be shipped along a new major powerline corridor to Las Vegas, Phoenix and other Western metropolitan areas.
Opponents, though, vowed to keep fighting the project. “We’re not giving up,” Lori Goodman, of the Navajo environmental group Dine CARE, told the Associated Press. The group argues the area’s Native residents already bear the brunt of the region’s heavy coal-generating pollution, and that the plants also endanger sacred sites and the region’s environment.
This remote corner of the Navajo Nation is already home to two large power plants, the San Juan Generating Station and the Four Corners Power Plant. The San Juan facility have been cited and sued several times for Clean Air Act violations, and the government ranks the Four Corners plant as the worst in the country for nitrogen-oxide emissions.
Proponents of the plant cite as benefits the more than 1,000 jobs construction of the plant would produce, and the 400 permanent jobs created once the plant begins operating, perhaps as early as 2010. Although supporters also cite the potential $52 million of tax revenue per year the plant could provide the tribe, the council also has granted a nearly 70 percent tax break to Sithe Global Power, the Houston-based company that would build the plant in conjunction with the Dine Power Authority.
Despite the size of the operation, Sithe Global claims the plant will use 80 percent less water than other plants its size, and generate less emissions than any coal plant in the country.
The project still has several hurdles in its path before construction can begin. A draft environmental impact statement is scheduled to be released in September, which will be followed by a comment and public hearing period. A final EIS is slated to be released in November or December of this year, with a final decision announced by March 2007.
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Comments
I asked this question while still trying to sort out Arnold Schwarzenegger's championship of the oxymoron "clean coal," the California legislature's sanctimonious "landmark" greenhouse gas emissions legislation. I have a copy of that legislation in front of me right now, but I think I should sleep rather than read it tonight. Big dirty energy's aggression all over the Navajo Reservation is so reprehensible and so offensive to fundamental decency that I can't help feeling obliged to do anything I can to stop it from here. I was planning to write to some San Francisco City Supervisors tomorrow to see if there is any way we can refuse any power that would come from the Desert Rock Plant were it, God forbid, to be built.
I even wrote an article about this for the "San Francisco Bay View, a National Black Newspaper," but their web archive suffered a terrible hack during a very similar, though urban, struggle, so this note reminds me to see if I can have that article posted elsewhere. The paper also published a press release from the Black Mesa Water Coalition at the same time.
I'm a bit confused, however, by what seems like the anger of your response to a simple question I asked three months ago. But perhaps you are simply angered by the very idea of the Desert Rock Coal-fired Power Plant, as I am.
In any case, best regards; we are on the same side--Katrina