KVIG Informative

President Ulysses S. Grant set aside land in southeastern Nevada for the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians by executive order on March 12, 1873. Ninety-two years later, a coal-fired power plant went into service less than 500 feet from that land and ran for half a century, contaminating groundwater the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection later spent years cleaning up. Today the same reservation hosts some of the largest solar generating capacity built on tribal land in the United States. The path from one to the other took a federal lawsuit, a $4.3 million settlement and a decade of construction crews.

Grant’s 1873 order set apart land along the Muddy River in what is now Clark County for local Native Americans, running from the north bank of the Colorado River along Nevada’s eastern boundary to a point one mile north of Muddy Springs, then west to the 115th meridian, according to the executive order itself as archived by the University of California, Santa Barbara’s American Presidency Project. That land became the Moapa River Indian Reservation, home to the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians.

NV Energy’s Reid Gardner Generating Station began operating in 1965, with additional coal-fired units added in 1968, 1976 and 1983, according to a factsheet published by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection. At its closest point, land owned by the Moapa Band of Paiutes sat approximately 500 feet from the plant’s property line, and tribal residences stood about a quarter-mile away, the same state factsheet found. The plant’s peak generating capacity reached 557 megawatts.

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The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection determined that water carrying elevated concentrations of dissolved salts migrated from the plant’s waste ponds into the area’s shallow groundwater, and the agency placed the site under an Administrative Order on Consent in 2008 requiring ongoing characterization and corrective action. Cleanup crews removed more than 2 million cubic yards of contaminated pond solids and soil between 2010 and 2017, according to the same agency.

The Moapa Band of Paiute Indians and the Sierra Club reached a $4.3 million settlement with NV Energy in July 2015 over the environmental and health effects of five decades of plant operations. Then-U.S. Sen. Harry Reid said at the time that the settlement acknowledged the harm the tribe endured, though he noted no sum could undo the effects of a half-century of pollution. NV Energy shut down the plant’s first three coal units on Dec. 31, 2014, and disconnected the fourth and final unit on March 11, 2017, according to the state environmental factsheet.

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Before the coal units finished closing, the tribe was already building something else on the same land. The Moapa Southern Paiute Solar Project, a 250-megawatt facility developed by First Solar on the Moapa River Reservation, began supplying power under a 25-year agreement with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy. More than 40 tribal members worked on the project, and First Solar committed to training tribal members for long-term operations and maintenance positions, the same federal office reported.

The tribe expanded further in 2020. On Jan. 24, 2020, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians and the Nevada State Historic Preservation Officer signed a memorandum of agreement clearing the way for the Eagle Shadow Mountain Solar Project, a 300-megawatt facility spanning up to 2,300 acres of reservation land, according to the agreement itself. The document required a treatment plan for affected archaeological sites and ongoing tribal consultation throughout construction, with any recovered artifacts becoming the property of the Moapa Band of Paiute Indians.

The 1873 order gave the Moapa Band a reservation. The 1965 plant took decades to show what sat next to it. The tribe that absorbed both is now generating more clean power on its own land than most of Nevada’s incorporated cities. That is not a coincidence of geography. It is what happens when the people who were poisoned by one energy system decide who builds the next one.