Alaska
Back to mapTo get to zero by 2050, Alaska must cut emissions by 3.7% a year
Emissions in Alaska
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
9% of Alaska'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 Alaska's 111,000 buildings.
That means we only need to electrify the remaining 111,000 dirty buildings in Alaska. That's around 4,000 per year.
Source: Microsoft, Mar 2021; NREL, Dec 2021Electrifying all buildings cuts 9% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Transport
32% of Alaska'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 171,000 vehicles in Alaska and 940 are already electric (0.5% of the total).
We need to electrify (or replace) the remaining 170,000 gas-powered vehicles. That's around 6,000 a year.
Source: DOT, Feb 2021Electrifying all transportation cuts 32% of the pollution.
Decarbonize Our Power
7% of Alaska's pollution comes from burning coal, gas, and oil to make power.
That's because of how power is generated in Alaska today.
Power Generation in the State of Alaska (2020)
But there's already 30% carbon-free electricity generation in Alaska!
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 Alaska
5 coal plants
93 MW
40 MW
31 MW
31 MW
23 MW
13 gas plants
418 MW
374 MW
204 MW
193 MW
171 MW
121 MW
81 MW
77 MW
46 MW
26 MW
20 MW
16 MW
8 MW
81 oil plants
181 MW
62 MW
42 MW
42 MW
36 MW
26 MW
26 MW
26 MW
26 MW
23 MW
22 MW
19 MW
19 MW
18 MW
15 MW
15 MW
14 MW
13 MW
13 MW
11 MW
10 MW
9 MW
8 MW
8 MW
7 MW
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7 MW
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6 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
5 MW
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4 MW
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3 MW
3 MW
3 MW
3 MW
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3 MW
3 MW
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3 MW
2 MW
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2 MW
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1 MW
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1 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 189 megawatt (MW) of wind power and 260 MW of solar power.
Since the average wind turbine provides 2.75 MW of peak capacity, Alaska would need to install about 69 turbines.
Since Alaska already has 14 MW of wind and 1 MW of solar, that's 174 MW of wind power we need to build and 258 MW of solar power. That's around 6 MW of wind power and 10 MW of solar power a year.
Source: EIA, Apr 2022Decarbonizing all dirty power cuts 7% of the pollution.
And gives us zero-emissions power we need to eliminate pollution from buildings and cars!
Other Emissions
The last 52% of Alaska'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