How dirty is the power generated in your state?

How clean is your electricity? It depends heavily on where you live. New data for 2024 shows a wide gap between states in "carbon intensity" — how much planet-warming carbon pollution comes from generating each unit of power. West Virginia, Kentucky, and Wyoming have the dirtiest power, largely because they still burn a lot of coal. Vermont has the cleanest, drawing essentially all its power from renewables, mostly hydropower, since 2015.

One wrinkle: this measures power generated in a state, not necessarily what actually reaches your outlets. Electricity travels across long-distance transmission lines, so a state that generates a lot of clean power, like Wyoming, might actually consume a different mix than it produces. Wyoming, for instance, generates about 12 times more electricity than it uses, exporting much of it elsewhere.

The bigger picture is encouraging: the U.S. power sector's emissions fell about 40% between 2005 and 2024, as aging coal plants closed and were replaced by cheaper natural gas and renewable energy. Nearly every state's grid got cleaner over that period, except Idaho and Vermont. Many states are still pushing toward fully clean power by midcentury, though rising electricity demand from data centers and federal policy shifts favoring coal and gas could complicate that progress. For homeowners weighing electrification upgrades like heat pumps, the cleanliness of your local grid is worth knowing, since it affects how much those upgrades actually cut your household's carbon footprint. That mix varies by state and may keep shifting in the years ahead.