Growing interest in developing Navajo utility-scale solar industry
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Key Findings
It should be noted that one mandate of the Navajo Tribal Utility Authority is to bring electricity to the entirety of the Navajo Nation, where some 15,000 households still lack electricity.
Initial indications are that viable utility-scale solar projects in the region must be built with a capacity on the order of 500-1,000MW, a requirement that demands hundreds of acres of land.
Executive Summary
Various interests across the Navajo Nation are showing a growing appreciation for the commercial possibilities in solar generation over an area that has long been dependent on increasingly outdated coalfired electricity generation and imported electricity.
This emerging interest in utility-scale solar is driven in no small part by the large-scale deployment of solar generation throughout the Southwest, which continues to grow rapidly as utilities “stop thinking of solar as a problem to be managed, and start thinking of it as an asset to be maximized,” as one prominent industry researcher has recently noted.
Few locales in the U.S. are richer in solar potential then the Navajo Nation, as is clear on the map below, borrowed from researchers at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and repurposed here by IEEFA to highlight how Navajo tribal lands are situated in the middle of the most sun-rich region of the country.
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Press release: IEEFA Arizona: Growing interest in developing Navajo utility-scale solar industry
