Throughout my youth, my mother got up at 5AM and drove off to work on a single huge project—the construction of TV’s Paradise Steam Plant. It was at the time the largest plant in Kentucky, and the largest coal-fired plant in the world. “Largest” was the word that described everything about the genuinely massive “Unit 3.” Largest boiler anywhere, the largest generators, largest cooling towers, and the largest capacity of over 1,100 megawatts. The plant was, and is, truly gigantic. To a slack-jawed kid visiting a construction site littered with bolts the size of cars and wire-coils the size of houses, everything there seemed to have been lifted from some updated version of Gulliver’s Travels.
Now it’s closing.
While coal plants have been going down at a rapid clip over the last few years, many of them have been the smaller, older, less efficient units. Now the economic factors that are driving coal out of the energy marketplace are coming for the giants. Paradise is just one of the large plants that are on the list to close over the next year, as the percentage of electricity made from coal—and the market for steam coal—continues to shrink.
Another of those going down in the next few months is the Navajo Generating Station at Page, Arizona. It’s closure will mean the end of one of the largest single sources of carbon in American history. It’s of the same generation of plants as Paradise, with the first unit coming on line in 1974. Over it’s 45 year span, it’s cranked out carbon dioxide at a rate of greater than 18 million metric tons a year—greater than the output of three million automobiles. It’s also been a large source of both the sulfur dioxide that fuels acid rain as well as a variety of nitrates. For visitors at the Grand Canyon who have found views of the natural wonder blocked by a low-lying brown haze, the Navajo Generating Station was the primary source.
Those visitors should expect the air to begin to clear before the end of the year, because Navajo Generating Station will soon be closed. With it will go Peabody’s Kayenta Coal Mine, which is connected to the power plant by an electric railway. The plant gets all of its coal from that source. The mine serves no other plant. The two will go down together. For several years, work will continue at both the mine and the plant to remediate environmental issues, salvage materials and equipment, and reclaim the huge scars in the earth. Then, after five decades, the place will go quiet.
As it happens, I also have a personal connection to the Navajo Generation Plant, or more specifically to the Kayenta Mine. For more than thirty years, I made frequent trips to that mine and its already defunct companion the Black Mesa Mine, which served a now closed power plant in Nevada. I did exploration geology and worked with the team there to help avoid areas where the coal had already been burned in the ground, as happens naturally in many areas. I watched the town of Kayenta grow from a crossroads to a community, and made many friends among the mostly Navajo and Hopi engineering team.
Navajo Generating Station needs to close. It has to close. From the beginning, many Navajo have thought that the mine, especially sited where it was on sacred Black Mesa, was an abomination. That section of the Navajo Nation is the most achingly beautiful place I know, the place that never fails to make me want to pull over to the side of the road, abandon my car, and simply walk. But I’ll worry what happens to my friends when the mine and the plant are gone.
The total amount of CO2 production at Paradise is only slightly smaller than that of Navajo. That’s what makes these closures, and others like Bruce Mansfield in Pennsylvania, so substantial. These aren’t part-time “peak usage” plants or small plants filling in a local gap in the supply. These are the big dogs, the mainline plants that are the backbone of electrical production. But they can no longer keep up.
The cost of building a new coal plant, which demands enormous size to achieve high efficiency, is so daunting that there have been no new plants on the drafting tables for decades. Now the cost of simply maintaining the plants is driving power companies to either shut them down or convert them to natural gas.
In fact, in the last two years, the cost of maintaining a coal powered plant has tipped past the point where it exceeds the cost of completely replacing the power produced by that plant. That’s not just replacing it with natural gas, but with wind or solar. A company could start, right now, and build a Paradise or a Navajo worth of solar, for less than it costs to keep the existing plants operating.
That kind of economics is why the closure of Paradise is expected to save TVA over $320 million.
Trump can dig all the coal he wants. Pretty soon .., there will be nowhere to sell it. Steam coal is used for power generation. You can’t eat it. It’s not a building material. The destruction of the coal industry has nothing to do with over regulation taking jobs away from workers. It has everything to do with the market simply moving along.
One more personal story. Somewhere between 1798 and 1805, John J. Sumner moved to a site along the Green River then dubbed Storm’s Landing. He, and the generation of settlers that came there to mine an iron-rich sandstone, renamed it Paradise. When the mine failed, he and his son Thomas started a farm. On that farm they raised a local “patriotic militia,” gathered their long rifles, practiced marching, and went off to join Andrew Jackson for the trip to New Orleans … at which point Jackson took their guns away, gave them to more competent troops, and sent my family home. They settled back on the farm. They lived there, and their children lived there, and their grandchildren, for the next 150 years.
Despite the John Prine song, it wasn’t “Mr. Peabody’s coal train” that destroyed Paradise. The town was abandoned after TVA built the first two power units with short smokestacks and no system for cleaning the emissions. The constant fall of acid-rich ash burned the paint from cars and buildings and eventually led to the town’s abandonment. TVA knocked much of it down in order to build Unit 3, where my mother went to work. On the old family farm.