A plan to address extreme heat, excessive dust, drought and other environmental issues was approved by the El Paso City Council this week, putting the city on par with many other major U.S. metros that have crafted similar plans to counter climate change and chart a path to a carbon-free future.
El Paso’s plan includes more than 50 different policies and programs. The overarching goals include making buildings in El Paso more energy efficient – by installing new roofing, insulation, windows or other fixtures – as well as installing more rooftop solar installations on public buildings, planting trees and improving local air quality.
But the plan will continue to change over time based on feedback from the public and city officials. City staffers will craft policies on data center development in El Paso based on public meetings in the coming weeks and incorporate more policies and programs in the climate plan.
“We’re not adopting a specific policy yet. It’s more of a guide that will essentially bring those policies forward,” said District 5 city Rep. Ivan Niño. “And that’s the time the council can start talking further (about) what they want to advocate within those specific policies.”
The City Council approved the climate plan 4-0 on Tuesday. City Reps. Alejandra Chavez, Deanna Maldonado-Rocha, Cynthia Boyar Trejo and Art Fierro were absent from the meeting.
The approval caps nearly three years of work by city staff who put the climate plan together based on numerous community meetings and surveys. The process started in November 2022, when El Paso voters approved a ballot proposition to create a city climate office and dedicated $5 million in bond funds to start the process. Voters separately rejected the Proposition K climate charter in May 2023.
A climate action plan has become imperative as El Paso has experienced steadily rising temperatures, persistent drought and historically intense dust storms that at times create dangerous air quality.
So far this year, El Paso on average has been nearly five degrees hotter than the 30-year average for this time of year, according to the National Weather Service. And 2023 through 2025 were the three hottest years on record in El Paso
Meanwhile, historically intense dust storms last year created among the worst air quality conditions that air monitors in El Paso have recorded since they started collecting data three decades ago. The city received about 9 inches of precipitation combined in 2023 and 2024, the driest two-year stretch for El Paso since the Dust Bowl era.
Who is paying for El Paso’s climate plan?
The city in 2023 won a $1 million grant from the Environmental Protection Agency that funded the planning process and development of the climate plan.
“We’re excited to get to the implementation,” said Fernando Berjano, senior climate program manager with the city who led development of the plan.
The city still holds about $5 million for climate projects from the 2022 bond proposition. Berjano said his office will allocate that money by bringing investment proposals for the City Council to approve.
Beyond that $5 million, the city is applying for grants from public entities such as Texas A&M University as well as seeking funds from private philanthropic organizations such as Bloomberg. Funding has remained the biggest question around the climate plan. The city previously won a $6 million grant to install rooftop solar on low-income households, but President Donald Trump’s administration canceled grant funding for clean energy projects nationwide that had been previously approved under President Joe Biden.
What’s in the plan?
Some of the plan’s initiatives include the cool roof program in which low-income households can apply for a new roof that reflects sunlight, makes a home more energy efficient and lowers utility bills. The city is also working with the pro-solar organization Solar United Neighborhoods to soon open a program for nonprofits to apply for free rooftop solar panel systems.
“This plan will guide specific climate projects like public EV charging stations, installing solar power on city buildings, improving air quality by monitoring systems at the international bridges and in communities impacted by poor air quality, and increasing the tree canopy and shade throughout the city,” said Jerry Kurtyka, an organizer with the Community First Coalition. “There’s something here for everyone.”
Planting trees throughout the city in areas with minimal tree cover is a major part of the climate plan, Berjano said.
“More trees, yes. And also, where those trees have to be planted,” Berjano said. “We’ve been working with UTEP. They’ve been working on this for quite some time, doing research on the impact of really planting the tree where it should be, so it provides shade and you get the benefit of lower utility bills.”
The climate plan isn’t complete just yet. The city is hosting a series of meetings from March 28 through April 8 to discuss whether to welcome or oppose the development of data centers in El Paso. The city organized the meetings amid intense public backlash to a data center Meta Platforms is building in El Paso that the city doled out big tax breaks and millions of dollars in incentives to attract.
“For the next, I want to say, few weeks, we’re going to be pretty much focused on the data center” meetings, Berjano said in an interview. He declined to share his opinion on the Meta data center, but he said his department will create a “framework” to shape potential data center economic development deals in the future.
“I envision bringing a framework with the input and the research from the team and with the stakeholders, and that framework is going to have recommendations. And then it’s up to City Council to approve or not those recommendations,” Berjano said.
“Is that going to mean changes to the code? I don’t know. Is that going to mean that we look at these things differently? I don’t know,” he said. “It’s like many times you see here: staff brings recommendations, and then, if they like it, we’ll move forward with whatever needs to be done.”
What about private industry?
There are limits to the city’s power to address climate change. The city measured total greenhouse gas emissions in the El Paso region using 2019 data as a baseline, with a goal of lowering emissions from the level recorded that year.
However, El Paso Electric recently asked regulators to allow the utility to build a 366-megawatt, natural gas-fired power station to provide electricity to the AI data center Meta is building in Northeast El Paso. For perspective, the utility currently has about 2,800 megawatts of total generation capacity.
El Paso Electric wants to work with a Houston-based company called Enchanted Rock, which produces small, gas-fired generators that it sells to customers like the grocery store chain H-E-B, which uses them as a backup for stores if the power grid goes out. El Paso Electric wants to use a noncompetitive procurement to contract with Enchanted Rock and stack 813 modular generators together to power Meta’s data center. It would be the biggest power generation facility Enchanted Rock has built.
According to figures published by Enchanted Rock, the generators planned for the data center’s power plant would emit annually about 117 metric tons of nitrogen oxides, which produce ground-level ozone, trigger asthma and cause respiratory problems. El Paso Electric’s proposed generating facility would increase the utility’s NOx emissions by about 5% compared with the level it reported in 2024.
Enchanted Rock declined to comment.
The power plant dedicated to Meta’s data center would also produce around 2,700 metric tons of carbon monoxide annually, as well as 42 metric tons of particulate matter, the small air particles that can cause a wide range of health problems, according to the emissions data published by Enchanted Rock and filings El Paso Electric submitted to the Public Utility Commission of Texas.
Air quality data show carbon monoxide pollution in El Paso is well below federal air standards, but particulate matter pollution here far exceeds standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The Public Utility Commission of Texas in the months ahead will decide whether to approve the plant’s construction. But as city officials have been putting the climate plan together in recent years, they didn’t factor in the construction of a new greenhouse gas-emitting power plant that would be by far the largest electricity generation facility in El Paso.
“Depending on what happens at the end with the generation associated with that specific data center, the emissions are going to change for sure” compared with the 2019 baseline, Berjano said.
Despite the city’s limited power, adopting a formal climate plan could make the city more competitive for additional grant funding, Berjano said.
Berjano’s goal now is to “keep the community engaged, getting feedback from the community, (about) good things that we do, things that we can improve. And we’ll keep engaging with them.”
“We know that there’s some concerns about funding or impact,” Berjano said. “So, we’re very aware of that. And the last thing we want is that this plan is an economic stressor.”
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