The three smokestacks stretching vertically from the Navajo Generating Station, near Page, Arizona, can be seen from miles away.

Towering 775 feet over the desert landscape and topped with billowing white smoke that mixes with cumulus clouds, the chimneys have been part of the skyline for nearly 50 years. Built in the early 1970s, the generating station is a 2,250-megawatt coal-fired power plant that provides electricity to customers in Arizona, Nevada and California—but is also the third largest emitter of carbon dioxide in the United States.

Since construction began in 1969, the plant and the coalmine that feeds it have created hundreds of jobs and produced millions of dollars in revenue for the Navajo and Hopi nations. At the same time they have come to symbolize both economic stability in this corner of the Navajo Nation and growing environmental concerns.

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But the Navajo Generating Station is operating on borrowed time. Citing high fuel costs and an industry-wide effort to seek alternative power sources, the plant’s four private utility owners voted on February 13 to decommission the plant and close it by the end of 2019—25 years ahead of schedule.

“The utility owners do not make this decision lightly,” said Mike Hummel, deputy general manager of Salt River Project, the plant’s operator. “NGS and its employees are one reason why this region, the state of Arizona and the Phoenix metropolitan area, have been able to grow and thrive. However, SRP has an obligation to provide low-cost service to our more than one million customers, and the higher cost of operating NGS would be borne by our customers.”

Utility owners now are negotiating with the Navajo Nation to secure an agreement that would allow the plant to continue operating through December 22, 2019, and allow removal and restoration activities, which could take as long as two years. Without an agreement between the owners and the tribe, the plant would be required to cease operations this summer.

The vote came as the plant’s utility owners—Salt River Project, Arizona Public Service, NV Energy and Tucson Electric Power—struggle with keeping the plant open in a time when alternative energy sources are becoming less expensive. The four utilities were scheduled to vote on whether they could realistically keep the plant open until the end of their original lease in 2044.

The Navajo Nation Council in the late 1960s approved construction of the plant, the opening of the Kayenta Mine, and installation of a 78-mile railroad and 800 miles of transmission lines. At the time, the Council extended to the utility owners a 50-year lease with the option of renewing that lease for an additional 25 years—until 2044.

The February 13 vote came as a blow to the Navajo Nation, where unemployment hovers above 50 percent. Yet the vote preserves, for nearly three years, as many as 1,300 jobs at the plant and Kayenta Mine, operated by Peabody Energy and located about 75 miles away.

Together, the mine and the power plant pay nearly $100 million per year in wages. Native American workers hold about 90 percent of the jobs.

The recent vote also provides the Navajo Nation the potential to keep the plant open beyond 2019, if it can find a new operator. However, a recent study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory found that electricity produced at the Navajo Generating Station is more expensive than “electricity purchased on the wholesale spot market.” The report also found that a turnaround might be years away, “especially if natural gas prices remain low,” the laboratory said.

Closure is good news for environmental groups that have long criticized the Navajo Generating Station as one of the dirtiest in the country and a major source of pollution in the West. The plant and mine emit 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide and methane per year, along with thousands of pounds of mercury, selenium and arsenic that end up in nearby water sources. The plant also produces 1.3 million tons of coal combustion waste per year.

In a joint statement released by the environmental groups Diné CARE, To’ Nizhoni Ani and the Black Mesa Water Coalition, activists celebrated the pending closure of the Navajo Generating Station and called it “an opportunity for jobs and a better future.” The announcement “presents an opportunity both to make amends for decades of pollution and injustice and to map out a far more sustainable future through clean energy,” the groups stated.

Navajo President Russell Begaye responded to the announcement with disappointment, urging the plant’s utility owners to honor their original lease agreement and keep the plant operating for another 27 years.

“To hear that the owners did not honor the amendment made by the Navajo Nation is something we did not anticipate,” Begaye said in a statement. “Although we do appreciate the extension, we still demand that the owners of the NGS honor the amendment until at least 2030 and, more specifically, until 2044.”