How a Mexican Landfill Became a 7 MW Power Plant for a City

In the industrial heartland of northern Mexico, a project born from necessity became a blueprint for sustainable urban energy. The Mount Verde landfill in Salinas Victoria, an industrial city adjacent to Monterrey, was once one of Latin America's most problematic dump sites. By the late 1990s, millions of tonnes of waste filled the site, releasing uncontrolled quantities of methane — a greenhouse gas far more potent than carbon dioxide — into the atmosphere.

Rather than allowing the landfill to continue polluting the air, engineers at Mexico's National Commission for Energy Savings, led by Fernando de la Barra, designed a system that captured the escaping methane and converted it into electricity. The result, commissioned around 2003, was a modest but impactful 7-megawatt power plant that drew its fuel from what had been a hazard.

Over its operational life, the facility generated enough electricity to serve approximately 25,000 homes every day. But its contribution extended well beyond residential supply. According to the World Bank, the plant eventually met nearly 60 percent of the energy required for Monterrey's public street lighting, government buildings, and drinking-water pumping stations. This meant that a city's routine infrastructure — lights on public roads, pumps moving safe water to households — ran partially on what used to be toxic emissions.

The project demonstrated something economists and engineers now call a triple benefit. First, it reduced methane leakage, a direct climate win. Second, it generated saleable electricity without burning fossil fuels. Third, it offered municipal governments a practical model for turning waste management costs into energy revenue.

Experts from the Inter-American Development Bank highlighted that the Salinas Victoria experience showed exactly how waste policy and energy planning could merge. Rather than treating landfill gas as an unavoidable environmental cost, municipalities could invest in capture infrastructure and recoup expenses through power sales and carbon credits. The model has since influenced discussions across Latin America, where rapid urbanization continues to generate enormous volumes of municipal solid waste.

Today, the Mount Verde project remains a reference case in waste-to-energy circles — proof that even a region dominated by heavy industry can find clean power solutions within existing waste infrastructure.