Will New Mexico perpetuate the energy status quo or take a new, more inclusive approach?
By Melissa Troutman
A wind turbine in eastern New Mexico contributes to the state’s renewable energy supply.
In 2026, the state of New Mexico sits at the threshold of two possible futures. One future amplifies the healing of the land and people, turning a deeply unjust legacy of toxicity and harm into resilient communities with agency over their own well-being. An alternative future perpetuates the current system of extraction, pollution, and dependence upon entities with the power to manipulate the land and its people. The choices made and the resources allocated over the next few years will determine which of these futures becomes real and to what extent.
New Mexico is uniquely perched at this tipping point. Within its borders lie incredible diversity, wisdom, and opportunity. It is home to immense reserves of energy and mineral resources, leading the nation in the growth of crude oil production while simultaneously generating most of its own electricity from renewable sources. No other state has more uranium—the critical component of nuclear power and weapons—and only a handful of other states can match its geothermal potential. Research and development for advanced technologies like quantum artificial intelligence and fusion energy add to the mix of priorities competing for access to and allocation of New Mexico’s land, water, and public resources.
New Mexico may be the site of the world’s first atom bomb detonation—where residents still suffer the consequences today—but it’s also home to Acoma Pueblo, the oldest continuously inhabited community in what is now the United States. And despite centuries of European settlement, many Native peoples still inhabit their ancestral lands. This means that in spite of harsh, unjust conditions perpetrated by colonists, technologists, and climate change, the traditions indigenous to this bioregion are still alive. Today, they are being woven together with modern tools in response to the current moment, when the consequences of industrial society and modern lifestyles have caught up to us.
Still, the modern industrial era shows no signs of slowing its consumption, and New Mexico is central to growing global fossil fuel use. The Permian Basin in southeast New Mexico and west Texas is the highest producing oilfield in the world, generating extensive harmful emissions and polluting the landscape. Workers and people living near these operations are routinely exposed to a hazardous mix of chemicals, including benzene, formaldehyde, and hydrogen sulfide. These exposures can pose acute and chronic health risks, and many workers have reported a lack of transparency around what they are exposed to and its full impacts.
As wildfires, heatwaves, and floods decimate communities and wildlife, New Mexico’s oil production is growing faster than that of any other state during the hottest years on record. Despite passing the Energy Transition Act in 2019, which developed renewable electricity standards and assistance for workers displaced by the closure of coal plants, New Mexico’s oil and gas production still grows at nation-leading rates. This has been an economic boom for some counties in the Permian Basin that now rely on the industry for over 70 percent of their annual budget to fund schools, clinics, roads, and social services. Forcing these communities to transition away from oil too soon could destroy them, leaving families unemployed and potentially unhoused. As policymakers and advocates look toward a fossil-free future, much care must be taken to ensure that oil communities have resources to assist with a transition.
Though legacy energy systems, like oil and natural gas, have powered New Mexico for decades, pipeline leaks and oil field flaring contribute to environmental pollution.
Some help could come in the form of enforcement, to keep pollution from oil and gas extraction abated while production is high. Yet in 2025, the oil and gas industry reported over 38,000 toxic spills and climate-harming methane leaks in New Mexico, and nearly all this pollution has gone unpunished. Furthermore, these spills are not accounted for in the state’s “nation-leading” methane standards to address climate change, and the air quality in the Permian Basin continues to plummet below national health standards. Other local impacts of this industry unfold in real time. Hotel clerks in Carlsbad track earthquakes caused by oil and gas operations with phone apps, while area nurses describe the respiratory ailment suffered by visitors as the “Carlsbad cough.”
In the case of the Permian, like the uranium mines and oilfields in northwest New Mexico, the true costs of energy extraction and production are clear. But just because a problem is in your own backyard doesn’t mean you’re more likely to fix it.
Last year, the federal government announced plans to resume uranium mining in New Mexico, even though contamination from former uranium mining has yet to be remediated. In 2026, the state Legislature voted down the Clear Horizons Act, which would have codified state climate standards and limited emissions. That same Legislature also failed to pass a bill to hold fossil fuel “microgrids” to renewable energy standards, including grids proposed to power data centers, some of which plan to emit more greenhouse gas pollution than New Mexico’s largest cities combined. The failed microgrid bill also would have protected consumers from rate increases resulting from the data center buildout.
These signposts don’t point to encouraging trends in New Mexico’s energy and climate future, which is directly tied to its economy, food, water, and well-being. But promising signs are also popping into the picture, like Rio Grande Community Farm in Albuquerque, which employs agrivoltaics to help meet local energy and food needs. Sovereign Energy, based in New Mexico and led by Indigenous women, is building Tribal energy self-determination through community solar across the Southwest. Mothertree Food and Forest, a nonprofit teaching agroecology in New Mexico and West Texas, is building food forests and repairing ecosystems, which in turn can restore water cycles, cut energy costs, and create climate resilience. These efforts and many more are rooted in deep, equitable relationships with the land and all who live upon it. And those roots are spreading.
But as these community efforts multiply, big plans for big tech from big pockets keep large-scale energy grids and the power behind them growing, too. What policies are needed to shape modernity within ecological boundaries? And how can all this happen justly, with consent—a critical element that social, economic, and political systems in the U.S. too often neglect—to ensure that those contributing the least to our climate crisis are not the ones doubly harmed in the quest to solve it?
As New Mexico grapples with its own future, its energy and economic choices will impact people around the world. Which of New Mexico’s abundant resources, knowledge bases, and economic pathways will be prioritized? Who will benefit? Who will pay the costs? And perhaps most importantly, who will get to decide?
These questions are essential to any review and analysis of energy projects under way in New Mexico. Wind power has become one of the fastest-growing sectors of the state’s energy economy, with the eastern plains delivering some of the nation’s most consistent wind resources. Energy analysts and state officials frequently rank eastern New Mexico among the most promising wind corridors in North America. The large-scale wind farms that have been constructed currently generate electricity for New Mexico, as well as neighboring states across the Southwest.
Solar energy is expanding just as quickly. With more than 300 days of sunshine each year, New Mexico has long been considered ideal territory for solar development, according to state energy officials and federal renewable energy assessments. Utility-scale solar projects are appearing across the state, while rooftop systems are increasingly visible in cities like Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Las Cruces. Community solar and agrivoltaics, the practice of growing crops and grazing livestock between solar panels, are gaining momentum as well.
For many people, these projects represent a glimpse of a different energy future—one less dependent on fossil fuels and more aligned with the state’s abundant renewable resources.
Yet renewable energy raises some of the same important questions that fossil fuels do—what are the impacts and who will bear them? Solar infrastructure requires massive quantities of silver, copper, silicon, and aluminum, mostly mined in far-off places. Who is living near and working in those mines? Wind farms change the visual character of rural landscapes and require hundreds of tons of concrete and steel for a single wind turbine. Who breathes the emissions from the cement and steel factories? Transmission lines must cross vast distances to deliver power to distant markets. Who lives in those pathways, and will their land be taken through eminent domain? In a state shaped by land theft and mining contamination, with deep cultural connections to the land, these questions are critical to any path forward.
Across New Mexico’s Tribal lands, energy development has historically occurred without meaningful local control. Uranium mines and coal operations that generated wealth for companies have left lasting environmental impacts. Many who live in Navajo land still lack electricity and running water.
Today, Tribal communities are working to reshape this dynamic. Renewable energy projects offer the potential for greater Tribal ownership and economic benefit, particularly through microgrids and community-scale solar systems that make it easier to generate and control local electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Indian Energy has identified Tribal renewable energy development as one of the fastest-growing areas of energy investment in the Southwest.
These efforts are about more than power generation. They are about sovereignty. In a state with 23 recognized tribes, those efforts could have lasting implications, not just for future generations, but for the region’s overall energy landscape.
Meanwhile, scientists and engineers across New Mexico are exploring technologies that could reshape the way energy is produced and stored. Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory are conducting research on advanced grid systems, battery storage technologies, and hydrogen fuels that promise to transform the nation’s energy infrastructure. Both laboratories have become central players in the national effort to modernize energy systems and develop large-scale renewable technologies. But large-scale energy infrastructure, while necessary to some degree, can leave local communities reliant on centralized systems and detached market forces that tend to treat them as numbers rather than neighbors.
Researchers at universities throughout New Mexico are also contributing to the transition effort with new approaches to solar technology, geothermal exploration, and grid resilience. These innovations could help address one of the biggest challenges facing renewable energy: reliability. Energy storage systems and advanced grid technologies are becoming essential tools for managing the fluctuations inherent to wind and solar harvesting.
Central to any conversation about energy, however, is water, which is quickly becoming a limiting factor in the arid Southwest. Determining how a particular energy source relates to water is key as New Mexico faces ongoing challenges related to drought and climate change. Oil, geothermal, and hydrogen production need steady sources of water to operate, while wind and solar do not. Water reliability is shaping energy choices just as much as battery storage.
Researchers and engineers are leaning on two controversial sources to meet future water needs: brackish water, which is salty groundwater that lies deep below freshwater sources; and produced water, which is toxic oil and gas waste. In recent years, these two previously dismissed sources have been sold as solutions to New Mexico’s diminishing fresh water supplies—provided they can be adequately treated. Millions of public funds have been funneled into research to develop complex, energy-intensive treatment technology to “clean up” brackish and produced water. Meanwhile, fundamental water conservation efforts to maintain and restore New Mexico’s current freshwater sources remain unfunded and largely ignored.
New Mexico may indeed hold vast reserves of brackish groundwater, and the state’s oil and gas industry produces over two million barrels (84 million gallons) of wastewater per year. Researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey, New Mexico State University, Sandia National Laboratories, and elsewhere suggest that large brackish aquifers across the Southwest and the oil industry’s waste could provide new water resources for industrial and energy applications if treatment technologies continue to improve. But focusing on potential fixes for the sake of large-scale development bypasses many of the critical questions posed earlier. They do not require consultation and consent and are a far cry from the democratized solutions that build local sovereignty and restore ecosystems.
Top: A truck is loaded with freshly picked apples that will be pressed into juice. Left: Mouthwatering bowl of freshly picked strawberries reflects the abundance of a regeneratively tended patch. Right Garden gate invites one to explore the hidden treasures within.
Some analysts believe New Mexico could become a major exporter of renewable electricity to neighboring states, particularly as demand grows across the Southwest for low-carbon power. Large wind and solar projects could supply power to growing cities across the Southwest, turning the state into a hub of regional energy production. But for many people, sustainable energy is about much more than replacing one energy source with another. For them, the goal includes building an energy system that supports comprehensive, long-term community and environmental health—not just continued opportunity for growth. Politicians like to say that balancing these interests requires careful planning and collaboration among state officials, local communities, Tribal governments, and private industry. But the real balancing act also requires something often left aside—a deep understanding and equitable relationship with the land, the water, and all the beings who dwell within. Only then can anyone truly know what is and is not appropriate.
For more than a century, oil, water, uranium, wind, and sun have shaped the state’s identity, culture, and economy. Now they are shaping something else: a moment of decision. New Mexico’s energy future depends upon many things, but a just and sustainable future will require consent, bioregional boundaries, ecological knowledge, and healing the harms of the past. These guardrails require a renaissance of responsibility—to ourselves, each other, and natural limits—that can only be realized when we are in closer, kinder relationships with everything around us.
From the Summer 2026 issue
