SRP crews near completion of Navajo Nation electrification mission

Salt River Project crews wrapped up a two-week push that brought electricity to nine Navajo Nation homes for the first time, using 153 power poles, eight transformers and about 84,000 feet of electrical line to reach households that had waited years for service.

The work was part of the Light Up Navajo effort, a long-running electrification campaign that has become one of the most visible infrastructure drives in northern Arizona. Since 2019, the broader mission has connected 128 homes to the grid, with crews planning to return in the fall to keep extending lines into remote areas where families still live without power.

The need remains enormous. The Navajo Tribal Utility Authority says roughly 10,407 families on the Navajo Nation still do not have electricity. Reporting cited by the American Public Power Association puts the burden in stark relief: more than 75% of U.S. households without electricity are on the Navajo Nation, a reservation that spans about 27,000 square miles across Arizona, New Mexico and Utah and includes about 300,000 residents and 55,000 homes.

For Apache County and nearby communities, the numbers point to a basic infrastructure gap that shapes everyday life. Homes without electricity must manage refrigeration, lighting, phone charging and basic safety without a stable grid connection, a problem that falls hardest on residents living far from the commercial centers of northern Arizona. A Tuba City Tribal Utility Office representative described the reservation economy as one built around a small number of basic services and very limited infrastructure.

The challenge is not just distance, but terrain. Some crews working on Light Up Navajo have faced conditions so difficult that digging pole holes took as long as three hours. Those delays help explain why the project has relied on outside utility companies, volunteer linemen and donated labor to lower the cost of serving homes that private utilities have long bypassed.

SRP’s own role shows how the work is being shared across the region. The Phoenix metro utility serves about 1.1 million customers, yet its crews have been repeatedly dispatched to the Navajo Nation as part of Light Up Navajo. In 2025, SRP crews installed 153 poles, eight transformers and 84,493 feet of line to reach nine homes, a scale of effort that mirrors the latest mission and underscores how much construction is needed to bring a single home onto the grid.

Light Up Navajo VI followed work that ran from April to August 2025, when 44 outside utility companies traveled to the Nation. The latest round moved the project closer to another season of work, with the same goal that has defined the mission from the start: bring power to homes that have gone without it for generations.