For 45 years, three concrete smokestacks dominated the skyline above Page, Arizona, visible for miles across the Navajo Nation’s red-rock plateau.
They belonged to one of the largest coal-fired power plants ever built in the American West, and every single day they were running, something staggering was happening to the water nearby.
Almost nobody outside the engineering world noticed it while the plant was alive.
Now that the plant is entirely gone, what it was doing to that water is finally coming back the other way.
A machine so big it had its own railroad and its own river supply
The Navajo Generating Station was a 2,250-megawatt coal-fired power plant located on the Navajo Indian Reservation in northern Coconino County, near Page, Arizona.
The site selected for the plant was about six miles east of Glen Canyon Dam and three miles south of Lake Powell, on 1,786 acres of land leased from the Navajo Nation.
That closeness to Lake Powell was not accidental.
The Kayenta Mine shipped about 8 million tons of coal each year to the power plant, which used up to 25,000 tons of coal per day when all units were fully running. Each year the plant also used nearly 8 billion gallons of water from Lake Powell for cooling.
Eight billion gallons. Every year. Drawn straight from one of the most stressed reservoirs in the country.
The numbers behind 45 years of full-tilt generation
The three coal-fired units each featured Combustion Engineering supercritical boilers paired with GE turbines, and were commissioned in 1974, 1975 and 1976, respectively.
They ran for four and a half decades, keeping the lights on across Arizona, Nevada and California.
The plant generated substantial volumes of coal combustion waste every year, the bulk of which was disposed of on or near the site.
And the broader retirement of coal giants like this one has reshaped the national grid. As coal plant closures accelerated across the West through the early 2020s, the Navajo shutdown stood out as far larger than most of what followed, a single closure erasing 2,250 megawatts in one move.
As GCN has reported, solar farms are now colonizing exhausted land across the country, but the Navajo site’s story took a different path entirely.
What the demolition crews found when they started tearing it down
Independence Excavating, an Ohio-based construction company, was contracted by Salt River Project to perform the decommissioning and demolition of the former Navajo Generating Station. The plant had safely provided reliable power to millions in the Southwest for nearly 50 years before commercial generation ended in November 2019.
The work encompassed 300 acres cleared and all structures brought down. The scope included shutting down, decontaminating, draining of fluids, torch cutting, explosive and hydraulic demolishing of the power block and related structures, including cooling towers, coal conveyance facilities and limestone crushing facilities.
The plant’s tallest icons, three 775-foot smokestacks, came down on December 18, 2020, in a single explosive blast.
The total acreage on the Navajo Nation affected by the plant’s related lease and rights-of-way was estimated to be approximately 7,500 acres.
That is nearly 12 square miles of plateau land, sitting silent now above one of the most famous bodies of water in the American West.
The real payoff hiding in the hydrology: Lake Powell is now reclaiming what the plant once took
Here is the twist the shutdown plan never formally named.
Each year the plant used nearly 8 billion gallons of water from Lake Powell for cooling. Since the Bureau of Reclamation confirmed the plant’s lease expired on December 22, 2019 , that draw has stopped completely.
Billions of gallons a year, no longer leaving the reservoir.
Lake Powell has been in crisis for years, with water managers scrambling to stabilize levels that affect hydropower generation at Glen Canyon Dam and water deliveries to tens of millions of people downstream.
The unused portion of Arizona’s Colorado River allocation is now what is known colloquially as “system water”, it stays in Lake Powell and helps the upper basin meet its water delivery obligation to the lower basin.
The coal plant’s retirement became one of the largest passive water returns in the Colorado River system’s modern history, with no dam built, no pipe laid and no press release issued.
As GCN has covered, energy sites fenced off for industrial purposes routinely surprise engineers with what nature does next when the machines stop.
What a cleared plateau beside a strained reservoir tells us about energy’s next chapter
The Navajo Nation and its partners are now working through what 7,500 acres of reclaimed plateau land near Lake Powell can become.
There is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transition former coal plant sites into public parklands, solar energy generation and energy storage projects. Coal plants were historically sited on lakes and rivers because of their massive water needs, and they have left legacies of pollution that must be cleaned up.
After a coal unit retires, the power plant site goes through a complex, multi-year process that includes decommissioning, remediation and redevelopment.
At Navajo, that process is still unfolding across a red-rock landscape where peregrine falcons and condors ride thermals above the plateau and the water below rises, imperceptibly but measurably, with every year the machines stay silent.
The biggest power move the plant ever made may be the one it is making right now, by doing absolutely nothing at all.
