Photo Courtesy SRP
Shutdown of Navajo Generating Station might position the nation to dominate the West’s renewable energy demands
By Jimmy Magaherno | PHOENIX magazine
For the past 11 years, Skyler June has worked as an operations and maintenance specialist at the Navajo Generating Station near Page, the largest energy-generating coal-fired power plant west of the Mississippi. Not coincidentally, it’s also the West’s biggest single polluting mechanism, spewing out more than 20 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, accounting for nearly a third of Arizona’s climate-warming emissions.
Now, with the aging plant finally set to be shut down on December 22 – an environment-positive decision accelerated by cheap natural gas prices and industry trends – June has a new gig. He’s one of 10 former NGS employees currently being retrained as IT specialists for Salt River Project, the plant’s operator and majority utility owner.
“At the plant, I was working in an environment that was hazardous on a daily basis,” says the 33-year-old, who recently relocated from his home in Kaibeto, a tiny town on the Arizona Navajo Nation about a 40-minute drive from the plant, to Mesa, commuting to his paid internship at SRP’s headquarters in Tempe. “Here, transitioning into an office space, the most I can get hurt is if I forget to hold the handrail and trip walking down the stairs!”
June’s story is one SRP likes to promote, as it epitomizes the company’s commitment to what climate activists would call a “just transition” for its employees as the utility moves into cleaner forms of energy production. While SRP’s pilot tech apprenticeship program only takes care of a handful of the 473 full-time, part-time and contracted workers let go from the plant, June’s success story highlights a laudable start to transitioning NGS’s largely Navajo workforce out of jobs in the declining coal industry and into high-tech careers geared toward renewable energy.
But retraining employees is only a piece of a complex socio-economic puzzle set in motion by the closure of the plant, along with the closure of the Kayenta Mine, straddling Navajo and Hopi land, that serves it.
