The owners of the shuttered Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nev., said they will decommission the power plant once supplied with coal from the Hopi and Navajo reservations.
Majority owner Southern California Edison shut down the 1,580-megawatt plant in 2006 because it needed pollution-control and pipeline upgrades costing more than $1 billion.
Edison shut down the plant in 2006 because it needed pollution-control upgrades to comply with a 1999 Clean Air Act settlement, a new water supply and pipeline upgrades costing $1.1 billion.
The Mohave plant had been one of the largest sources of pollution in the West. Environmentalists for decades blamed it for degrading views at the Grand Canyon and said it emitted high amounts of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and fine particulates.
They sued under the Clean Air Act to force the plant to add modern pollution controls like scrubbers, a filter system and new burners to reduce emissions by Jan. 1, 2006, or shut down. Edison had planned to upgrade and restart the plant but said later that year that it needed too many repairs for the effort to go forward.
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The plant had been fueled by coal from the Hopi and Navajo reservations in northeast Arizona, mixed with water and transported by a 273-mile pipeline to the plant. When the plant closed, so did the Black Mesa Mine in Kayenta, delivering a substantial blow to the economies of the tribes.