New Mexico
Back to mapTo get to zero by 2050, New Mexico must cut emissions by 3.8% a year
Emissions in New Mexico
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
5% of New Mexico'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 New Mexico's 1.0 million buildings.
In fact, 23.3% of appliances in buildings in New Mexico are already fossil fuel free!
That means we only need to electrify the remaining 795,000 dirty buildings in New Mexico. That's around 30,000 per year.
Source: Microsoft, Mar 2021; NREL, Dec 2021Electrifying all buildings cuts 5% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Transport
21% of New Mexico'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 624,000 vehicles in New Mexico and 3,000 are already electric (0.4% of the total).
We need to electrify (or replace) the remaining 621,000 gas-powered vehicles. That's around 24,000 a year.
Source: DOT, Feb 2021Electrifying all transportation cuts 21% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Power
24% of New Mexico's pollution comes from burning coal, gas, and oil to make power.
That's because of how power is generated in New Mexico today.
Power Generation in the State of New Mexico (2020)
But there's already 28% carbon-free electricity generation in New Mexico!
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 New Mexico
3 coal plants
2,270 MW
1,848 MW
257 MW
19 gas plants
666 MW
656 MW
650 MW
519 MW
464 MW
398 MW
212 MW
186 MW
154 MW
150 MW
102 MW
88 MW
85 MW
67 MW
50 MW
47 MW
16 MW
7 MW
5 MW
1 oil plant
Source: EPA, Jan 2021
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 3,000 megawatt (MW) of wind power and 3,000 MW of solar power.
Since the average wind turbine provides 2.75 MW of peak capacity, New Mexico would need to install about 938 turbines.
Since New Mexico already has 1,000 MW of wind and 254 MW of solar, that's 1,000 MW of wind power we need to build and 3,000 MW of solar power. That's around 52 MW of wind power and 99 MW of solar power a year.
Source: EIA, Apr 2022Decarbonizing all dirty power cuts 24% of the pollution.
And gives us zero-emissions power we need to eliminate pollution from buildings and cars!
Other Emissions
The last 49% of New Mexico'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