Slabs of pale orange sandstone the size of tall buildings jut up near where a hydropower facility might one day sit on the Navajo Nation.
Raymond Peaches walked across the land on a bright day in August. One of the hydro project’s reservoirs could be built on the high desert landscape where his cattle graze, along a place called Black Mesa.
“This is therapy,” Peaches said, wearing a green camouflage shirt and turquoise necklace. “There's no other place in the world that's this beautiful. I mean, this is millions and millions of years of formation that happened, and you want to destroy it, just to make money?”
For generations, his family has watched the sun rise and set along the rim of Black Mesa. It’s a massive, mountainous plateau dotted by pinyon pine and juniper about 20 miles south of the Arizona-Utah border.
Many of Peaches’ relatives live near a shuttered coal mine on top of the mesa, he said, the remnants of an industry that provided scores of high-paying jobs to Navajo citizens.
Peaches ticked through the reasons he thinks the arid mesa shouldn’t be the site of a pumped-storage hydropower plant: concerns about water overuse, unmarked graves, ancient cliff dwellings and endangered species like the Mexican spotted owl.
“We used to herd sheep up those hills, and yes, you do camp out there, and then you can hear the owls,” he said.
Since 2021, the energy company Nature and People First Arizona PHS, led by French entrepreneur Denis Payre, has proposed hydroelectric projects on and below the mesa. That includes one that’s awaiting approval for a preliminary permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, to study whether it would be feasible.
Supporters of the company’s newest project proposal say it would bring jobs and water to tribal communities. Opponents say they’re concerned about water overuse in a place that has cultural significance for both the Navajo and Hopi tribes. They take issue with how Payre and his allies have allegedly behaved as they try to build support in the tribal nation.
A $10,000 offer and letters to donors
That includes critics like Nicole Horseherder, who's from Black Mesa. She’s the executive director of the Navajo-led nonprofit Tó Nizhóní Ání, which says it works to protect water sources in the region.
Publicly available emails show that in March 2024, Payre offered a $10,000 donation to Horseherder’s nonprofit, which has publicly opposed his projects. Payre wrote to Horseherder that the donation would be “contingent” on her group ending its opposition and sending a statement supporting his plans.
In exchange, Payre said he would cap the size of his proposed projects.
Horseherder declined Payre’s offer on behalf of the nonprofit.
After that, two local leaders with ties to Payre separately sent letters to the group’s donors to complain about their resistance to energy projects like Payre’s, according to letters reviewed by KNAU. They also encouraged donors to back away from supporting the group.
Those leaders include then-Chilchinbeto Chapter President Paul Madson, a tribal member who’s listed as in support of the project on Payre’s website and has written opinion editorials in favor of it.
The other was Matthew Gonzales, then-executive director of Four Corners Clean Energy Alliance, a nonprofit that says it advocates for clean energy development in the region.
The alliance’s website lists Payre’s Nature and People First as a member.
A November 2024 complaint from Gonzales to a Tó Nizhóní Ání donor accused the group of using the donor’s funds to influence tribal legislation, something he claimed violates an Internal Revenue Service policy restricting nonprofits from lobbying.
“We ask that you reconsider your funding of this organization, as we believe it is not operating in accordance with the law of the United States and is ultimately detrimental to the Navajo People,” Gonzales wrote to the funder.
In an interview, Horseherder said she hired an attorney, Brad Bartlett, to review the nonprofit’s lobbying compliance and assess Gonzales’ allegations.
Bartlett told her that Gonzales’ claims don’t apply to her group, because nonprofits can use certain funds for lobbying for or against tribal policies as long as it’s not a significant part of their activities.
Based on his assessment, the nonprofit had engaged in only a small amount of lobbying, he told her.
Gonzales, who has since stepped away from the alliance, said Payre did not ask him to send the complaints, and that Payre was not consulted beforehand. Gonzales sent similar letters to many of Tó Nizhóní Ání’s funders, he said.
“We did notify the [Chilchinbeto] chapter house that we had — I want to say that we notified Paul [Madson] and told him that we had made that complaint and made him aware of it,” said Gonzales, referencing his letters to funders.
Madson’s letter
Then, in January 2024, Madson reached out to the same Tó Nizhóní Ání funder as Gonzales, writing, “We seek your support in rectifying this situation and ensuring that funds from your organization are utilized to foster positive change and sustainable development in our community.”
Madson did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.
Horseherder said countering the local leaders’ complaints took about eight months.
“It really held up the other work that I could have been doing, and it was stressful,” Horseherder said, adding she wasn’t aware of any donors who dropped funding to Tó Nizhóní Ání as a result of Madson or Gonzales’ complaints.
In Horseherder's view, the messages from Payre and those affiliated with him show they’ve used questionable tactics to try to get what they want.
“We’re just a big, huge thorn in their side, and they want us gone so that they can move forward with their project,” Horseherder said.
Gonzales said his letters came from a belief that the nonprofit had overstepped and violated IRS regulations.
Payre said he had nothing to do with Madson and Gonzales’ letters to funders, and that the $10,000 offer was to recognize Horseherder’s nonprofit for its input.
“We tried to build bridges and we tried to offer … cooperation and a path to a positive future, and at one point in time, they decided to radicalize and they decided to reject all that,” Payre said.
But emails from Payre to Horseherder show her donors were on his mind. In one email from March 2024, Payre cited “actions” related to IRS policy that another group had taken against her nonprofit, adding that he had not joined those efforts. He also wrote that he had discouraged local officials like Madson from reaching out to the nonprofit’s funders.
“At this juncture,” Payre wrote, “we find ourselves questioning whether our commitment to peace and dialogue has been misinterpreted as a sign of weakness.”
A Navajo law professor weighs in
The $10,000 offer is the sort of thing Heather Tanana has seen before. She’s a Navajo citizen and water law professor at the University of Denver. Tanana said it’s not uncommon for developers to offer communities cash or investments in exchange for support. In fact, if it’s a large enough sum, it can sometimes be in a community’s best interest to accept money and support a project.
“I don't totally fault them, honestly, for initially offering a sum figure because that's the way business works, but that's outside of Indian Country, outside of tribal nations and the way that they do business in their communities. So when it was like, ‘No, we mean no,’ they should have respected that,” she said.
“What I find a little shocking, and I do think crosses the line, is the threat to their funders, because they are unhappy with their kind of stance and unwillingness to change their position, and then to go after their funding,” Tanana continued.
But Payre insisted he had nothing to do with Madson and Gonzales’ letters.
“Paul [Madson] is a free citizen and has free speech, and is obviously allowed and able to do that,” he said. “But we're not involved in that, not at all.”
In Tanana’s opinion, Payre and his company are just the latest non-Natives to try to impose their will on the Navajo people, even if he’s won support from some tribal leaders.
“There's such a history of outsiders coming into Indian Country with the idea [that] … they know what's right, and they know how to get it,” she said.
Here’s how the project would work
Pumped-storage hydropower facilities consist of interconnected reservoirs.
Some are at high elevations, some are down low.
Water flows from an upper reservoir down through a pipe connected to a lower reservoir, turning a turbine and generating energy as it travels.
Then, when electricity is relatively inexpensive, like in the middle of the day, water is pumped back uphill, and the cycle repeats.
Payre said his newest proposal, the Chilchinbeto Pumped Storage Project, would require the construction of a transmission line and two 300-acre reservoirs on and below Black Mesa.
Energy needs in the U.S. are expected to surge
There’s evidence pumped-storage hydro projects like Payre’s could be useful to help support a U.S. power grid facing increasing strain. Such projects store and release power, helping to balance the grid when demand is high.
“We'll be able to provide electricity to about 600,000 citizens of Arizona, in total,” Payre said. “It's also going to help probably a number of industrial projects like semiconductor factories in the Phoenix area.”
He said his hydro plant would be sustainable, since much of the water used to fill its reservoirs would be continuously recycled.
If FERC greenlights the project for a preliminary permit, Payre said it will bring electricity to cities in the Southwest and economic opportunity to tribal members. He claimed the facility would create about 1,000 jobs during the construction phase, with about 100 direct and indirect jobs during its roughly 100-year lifespan.
A preliminary permit doesn’t allow any construction to take place. Instead, it acknowledges a developer is first in line to build a plant, and authorizes feasibility studies. Construction would only happen if FERC later grants Payre an official license.
To fill its reservoirs, the plant would pump water from either the Coconino aquifer deep underground or the San Juan River in Utah, over 40 miles away. Payre says he would make water infrastructure available to nearby communities and ranchers to use for watering their livestock.
“Water will be a huge benefit also for the [Navajo] Nation, … helping the local community with grazing, helping potentially farming if they want to start farming a little bit, and helping also mitigate climate change,” he said.
Past hydro projects proposed for Black Mesa
This isn’t Payre’s first attempt to build a hydro project on Black Mesa. During the Biden administration, FERC denied three projects proposed for the same area, writing that Payre had not sought the Navajo Nation’s consent for the use of its land.
In denying those projects, federal regulators also issued a nationwide policy saying they would not grant preliminary permits to hydro projects proposed on tribal land if the tribe opposes them.
At the behest of the Trump administration, FERC is now considering rolling that policy back to make it easier for developers like Nature and People First.
Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren said in a statement to KNAU that he opposes Payre’s latest proposition over concerns about groundwater overuse. The region is still reeling from decades of groundwater withdrawals due to coal mining.
But Payre argues his hydro plant would require a small amount of groundwater relative to the Coconino aquifer’s total size: the two reservoirs would have a maximum capacity of 10,000 acre-feet of water each. Plus, he said Nygren will be leaving office soon, and the Navajo Nation will have a new chief executive.
“We're going to talk to that new president,” Payre said.
Horseherder shares Nygren’s concerns about groundwater overuse and said she thinks the Navajo people shouldn’t feel required to lease their land for power generation.
“What we are obligated to [do] is protecting our water, and protecting our land … essentially, protecting the environment, so that we can leave our future generations something,” Horseherder said.
A spokesperson for FERC told KNAU they couldn’t comment on when it would issue a decision on a preliminary permit for the project, but Payre said he’s expecting one soon.
If all goes according to plan, he said the hydro plant could be up and running by around 2032.
