What makes your electricity
100 squares = all of it.
The carbon cost
—
grams of CO₂
per kilowatt-hour
per kilowatt-hour
⚡ Grid Atlas
Flip a switch and power just… appears. But every kilowatt-hour has a story — a dam, a wind ridge, a coal seam, an atom. Type your ZIP code and meet your grid.
Hover any state for details. Click it to explore.
The #1 source of electricity in each state, 2025. Texas leans on gas and wind. Washington runs on rivers.
Brighter green = more from sources that release little or no CO₂: solar, wind, water, nuclear, geothermal .
Coal made — of US electricity in 2001 — just — today. Gas, wind, and solar took its place.
The same lightbulb is about 7× dirtier in West Virginia than in Washington — and 45× dirtier than in Vermont.
100 squares = all of it.
A typical 24 hours on — every hour of 2025, averaged. Keep scrolling.
Nuclear plants hum along all night — they don't like stopping. And the wind often blows hardest in the dark.
Watch the yellow band. The sunnier your grid, the bigger the midday bulge — and the cleaner every load of laundry you run right now.
The sun sets right as everyone comes home and switches things on. Gas plants ramp up fast — and batteries give back the afternoon's sunshine.
No hour-by-hour chart here: the federal grid monitor doesn't track Alaska's, Hawaii's, or Puerto Rico's island grids — they run on their own, disconnected from the mainland.
All 50 states (and D.C.) have a researched timeline of the dams, deals, and disasters that shaped their power. Click any state on the maps above — or start with one of these five.
…or jump straight to any state: