Indoor Pot Farms Tax Power Grid

By J.A. Savage, AlterNet. Posted November 30, 2000.

A hundred females ripe for sex languish impatiently in a brightly-lit room waiting for a male, any male, to filter through that door and satisfy their needs. If only a male would come. They never do.

Such are the exasperated lives of indoor-grown marijuana plants. The only commercially useful plants are females, so the males are aborted, before they can impregnate females with their pollen. As they mature, these frustrated ladies still produce an enticing perfume, hoping to attract the male pollen -- the chemical THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), quite buzz-inducing and quite illegal, which is why the lusty lasses must be hidden indoors.

Unlike their wilder outdoor sisters, these females, kept on the vegetable equivalent of a tanning bed, use up an inordinate amount of electrical energy. Energy that could otherwise be provided by the most renewable power available: the sun.

In an era when outdoor pot is a pariah -- the target of multi-million-dollar eradication programs -- indoor growing operations have flourished, creating an electricity-sucking enterprise locked away in barns and closets and backrooms. And this has happened at a time when the nation's electric grid has trouble keeping the juice on for folks who don't have the solar alternative, from big factories to the computer power needed to write this story. Marijuana's move indoors is one more factor stressing out the electric system.

So far this year, the Drug Enforcement Agency has seized 80,000 indoor-grown plants, busting 1,000 "operations," according to a DEA source. Doing the math at 20 plants per light running 16 hours a day, leads to the monthly consumption of 2 million kilowatt hours -- about the hourly output of a very large power plant. And that's only what the federal government has discovered.

Grow lights suck 1,100 watts apiece out of the system. Compare that with your average 60-watt reading bulb. An average residential consumption is 500 kilowatt hours a month, according to Pacific Gas & Electric. A 10-lamp operation would consume over 3,000-kilowatt hours a month running a minimum of 12 hours a day. Bob Kinosian, analyst with the California's state-run consumer organization, Office of Ratepayer Advocates, estimates the lamps run more like 16 hours a day. A 60-lamp operation running 16 hours a day would suck up a stupendous 30,000 kilowatt-hours in a month. And you think your electric bills are high? Still, the operations can produce at least two or three pounds per light, according to Kinosian -- more than enough to pay the utility.

The leading states for indoor growing operations, according to the DEA, are California, Florida, Oregon and Wisconsin. And, officers are finding more and more indoor grows every year, leading to the assumption that marijuana producers and aficionados are forgoing free-range pot grown from renewable solar power for the safer buzz of "kept" sinsemillia. Of all the marijuana seized in 1997, only 6 percent was from indoor grows. That went up to 16 percent in 1999, according to the DEA.

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