Colorado
Back to mapTo get to zero by 2050, Colorado must cut emissions by 3.8% a year
Emissions in Colorado
Million metric tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) 
equivalent (MTCO2e ) emissions
Note: Grey area indicates missing data due to processing delays.
Source: WRI, Mar 2021
This is how we're going to do it
- Boilers and furnaces with heat pumps
- Gas stoves with electric induction stoves
- No-till farming to keep CO2 in the soil
- Capturing methane leaks from landfills
- Capturing CO2 to make emissions-free concrete
- Burning green hydrogen to make emissions-free steel
- Plugging methane leaks from gas pipelines
Decarbonize Our Buildings
10% of Colorado's climate pollution comes from buildings.
We burn fossil fuels to heat our air, water, and food.
To cut this pollution...
Let's electrify our heat!
We'll replace...
...in all of Colorado's 2.2 million buildings.
In fact, 27.9% of appliances in buildings in Colorado are already fossil fuel free!
That means we only need to electrify the remaining 1.6 million dirty buildings in Colorado. That's around 60,000 per year.
Source: Microsoft, Mar 2021; NREL, Dec 2021Electrifying all buildings cuts 10% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Transport
24% of Colorado's pollution comes from cars, trucks, trains, and planes.
But mostly from cars.
To cut this pollution,
your next car must be electric.
Or consider going car-free with public transit, bikes/e-bikes, car share, or other alternatives!
There are 1.6 million vehicles in Colorado and 25,000 are already electric (1.5% of the total).
We need to electrify (or replace) the remaining 1.6 million gas-powered vehicles. That's around 61,000 a year.
Source: DOT, Feb 2021Electrifying all transportation cuts 24% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Power
27% of Colorado's pollution comes from burning coal, gas, and oil to make power.
That's because of how power is generated in Colorado today.
Power Generation in the State of Colorado (2020)
But there's already 31% carbon-free electricity generation in Colorado!
To clean up the emissions from the polluting power plants we need to replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and wind farms.
...and find good jobs for those workers.
Current Fossil Fuel Power Plants in Colorado
9 coal plants
1,635 MW
1,428 MW
800 MW
552 MW
465 MW
283 MW
257 MW
114 MW
3 MW
26 gas plants
1,427 MW
1,149 MW
685 MW
554 MW
540 MW
420 MW
398 MW
397 MW
300 MW
297 MW
251 MW
228 MW
194 MW
154 MW
154 MW
118 MW
114 MW
101 MW
84 MW
61 MW
53 MW
35 MW
33 MW
27 MW
13 MW
10 MW
6 oil plants
129 MW
31 MW
19 MW
12 MW
10 MW
6 MW
But wait!
It's not enough to replace our power plants with wind and solar farms.
To power our electric cars and buildings, we need two times the electricity we have today.
In all, we'll need to build 7,000 megawatt (MW) of wind power and 6,000 MW of solar power.
Since the average wind turbine provides 2.75 MW of peak capacity, Colorado would need to install about 2,000 turbines.
Since Colorado already has 2,000 MW of wind and 318 MW of solar, that's 5,000 MW of wind power we need to build and 6,000 MW of solar power. That's around 193 MW of wind power and 222 MW of solar power a year.
Source: EIA, Apr 2022Decarbonizing all dirty power cuts 27% of the pollution.
And gives us zero-emissions power we need to eliminate pollution from buildings and cars!
Other Emissions
The last 39% of Colorado's climate pollution comes from other sources...
This includes farming, landfills, industry, and leaks from gas pipelines.
There's no one solution to solve these problems, but there are lots of great ideas:
That doesn't mean there's no solution, it just means that clean electrification doesn't help with these problems, and you could fill a whole book with covering all of them. We need to encourage our politicians to invest in researching new solutions and implementing existing solutions to these problems!
Ready to do your part?
Learn how to electrify your own machines and pass local policy to electrify the rest
Take Action