The Navajo and Hopi have fought hard to hold onto coal. Three generations have worked for the West's largest coal-fired power plant, the Navajo Generating Station. The tribes have relied heavily on its revenue. So when the Phoenix-based Salt River Project announced it was shutting down the plant at the end of the year, the tribe scrambled to find a buyer or — as a last resort — purchase the plant. It finally came down to a vote late last month at a Navajo Nation Council Special Session meeting. The delegates deliberated for eight hours. The council finally voted against the purchase...That decision marks the end of an era. Before coal, many tribal members worked with the federal government to blast uranium out of the Navajo Nation to make atomic weapons. "The Navajo economy had been kinda built upon resource extraction," said Brett Isaac, who grew up next to the Peabody Kayenta Coal Mine. "I still have an uncle that works for the Peabody Energy Co. I've had other uncles and cousins and friends and ... You had a lot of people who that's the only industry and job they ever knew."...Now Isaac and a group of entrepreneurs have formed Navajo Power, a renewable energy company that's trying to help the tribe shift away from coal. The tribe has built two utility-sized solar farms already and it's working on a third...There's just one problem. The number of jobs at a solar farm can't compare to coal. The plant and mine supplied 800 of the best-paying jobs on the Navajo Nation and many more support jobs. Solar, on the other hand, requires hundreds of temporary employees to construct the farm, but after it's built the sun does most of the work. That's a tough sell to a tribe where half of the people are unemployed...MORE
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