Merry merry Christmas, potheads.

As pot-growing expands, electricity demands tax U.S. grids

Jennifer Oldham - Bloomberg - Thursday, December 24, 2015

link

[Quote] Pot’s not green.

The $3.5 billion U.S. cannabis market is emerging as one of the nation’s most power-hungry industries, with the 24-hour demands of thousands of indoor growing sites taxing aging electricity grids and unraveling hard-earned gains in energy conservation.

Without design standards or efficient equipment, the facilities in the 23 states where marijuana is legal are responsible for greenhouse-gas emissions almost equal to those of every car, home and business in New Hampshire. While reams of regulations cover everything from tracking individual plants to package labeling to advertising, they lack requirements to reduce energy waste.

Some operations have blown out transformers, resulting in fires. Others rely on pollution-belching diesel generators to avoid hooking into the grid. And demand could intensify in 2017 if advocates succeed in legalizing the drug for recreational use in several states, including California and Nevada. State regulators are grappling with how to address the growth, said Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner Pam Witmer.

“We are at the edge of this,” Witmer said. “We are looking all across the country for examples and best practices.”

The corporatization of what was once off-the-grid narco- agriculture is taxing electrical systems even as the nation prepares to comply with the Paris climate accord and the Environmental Protection Agency tries to reduce greenhouse gases from coal-fired power plants, which is considered the single largest domestic source of emissions that create global warming.

“Consumers seeking a green lifestyle are likely unaware that their cannabis use could cancel out their otherwise low- carbon footprint,” Evan Mills, a senior scientist for California’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, wrote in an e-mail.

Indoor growing operations in 2012 racked up at least $6 billion a year in energy costs, compared with $1 billion for pharmaceutical companies, Mills found in a seminal study he did independent of the research institution. Some larger facilities today suck down as much as $1 million in power a month.

ArcView, an Oakland, California, research firm, estimates the retail and wholesale marijuana market will reach $4.4 billion in 2016.

Cultivation operations from California beach cities to Denver’s warehouse district to District of Columbia closets are waiting months for new infrastructure to bring them power. Planners predict the escalating consumption could in some regions undo Americans’ attempts to save energy by buying more efficient refrigerators, washers and hair dryers.

With the industry just coming out of the shadows, utilities are without data to forecast its electrical needs.  “We don’t have aggregated energy audits from hundreds of grow operations that show us an energy footprint,” said John Morris, director of policy and regulatory affairs at CLEAResult, an Austin, Texas-based consultancy that works with growers and utilities. “We have utilities in the North ... [blah, blah, blah unquote]

Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch.   What is going on here?  They are kvetching that pot growers are using too much power.  This is agriculture.  These are farmers.   Are there serious people complaining that farmers are using too much energy?   Farmers produce oxygen from their crops and greenhouse gases from their livestock.    Looks to me like the government, federal, state, and local and the power companies, which are mostly owned by the local taxing authority are reaping an incredible windfall in new tax and energy production revenue.  Poor babies.

"Without design standards or efficient equipment....   While reams of regulations cover everything from tracking individual plants to package labeling to advertising, they lack requirements to reduce energy waste...."    

Did Microsoft have "design standards" and "reams of regulations... when they went into business?   Did Apple?   Did Blackberry; did Johnnie Walker Red; did the Long Island RR or Ralph Cramden's employer the Fifth Avenue Coach Lines; did Alex Bell, Tommy Edison, George Westinghouse, Larry Edelson, Mikey Bloomberg, Alexie Kalishnikoff, John Browning, Paramount movie theaters, Dumont Television, Fred Friendly of CBS, Random House publishing company, Correction Corporation of America, the Lingerie Football League...    What a crock of hack reporting this piece is.  Incredible.   Who MAKES design standards?   The first entrepreneurs who invent or develop an industry create the design standards, NOT the government.   Sam Colt, John Browning and others developed the standards for ammunition and sold those standards to the government.

Who wrote those so-called "reams of regulations" that "lack requirements" on energy waste?   Reams means paper, which comes from tree wood, which is destroyed forms of life by the ton to generate the medium for the wasteful, inefficient, and energy consuming government to act out its perverse need to control the citizens.   Come on.  What a nutty point of view.

Some growers "rely on pollution-belching diesel generators to avoid hooking into the grid."   This way slanted observation seems to ignore the fact that we have over 26.4 million pollution-belching diesel" engines on trucks excluding publicly owned busses, garbage trucks, 18-wheelers, ships, tanks, passenger cars, construction sites, farm implements, and hospital and emergency agency backup power supplies. 

• $33.1 billion paid by commercial trucks in federal and state highway-user taxes in 2009"

http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industry_Data.aspx