POT GROWERS TAKING A HIT FROM ELECTRICITY SHORTAGE

EUREKA -- The marijuana growers of Humboldt County already have enough
to worry about -- cops dropping in by helicopter to trash their plants,
stoned-out neighbors ripping them off and nasty rainstorms washing out
their roads. Now, just as winter's indoor-growing season demands more
electricity than ever, here comes the state's power burnout.

Many of the big-time growers have moved indoors and off the PG&E grid,
producing their own diesel-generated power to avoid detection. But
smaller entrepreneurs -- some of them growing marijuana semi-legally for
medicinal use -- remain plugged in.

And by using 1,000-watt bulbs to trick plants into flowering, they're
getting hit with power bills nearly as high as the folks smoking their
product.

"We already have issues with law enforcement and issues with patients,"
said Dennis Turner, executive director of an Arcata cannabis club that
distributes cut-rate medicinal marijuana to 110 clients. "The last thing
we need now is an energy crisis."

Ever since growers began moving indoors to evade the aerial surveillance
of their open-air crops by police, the pot-growing industry has
displayed an incredible appetite for kilowatts.

"Power is probably the biggest single cost for these guys," said
sheriff's Deputy Randy Garcia, with the department's four-man anti-drug
unit. "They're burning 1,000-watt high-pressure sodium lights for 12 or
18 hours a day, and they're doing it 10 months of the year. That calls
for either a lot of electricity or a lot of diesel."

The previous day, Garcia's crew had raided an operation where 88 lights
were used to grow 3,500 plants, an amount worth $400,000 cut and dried.
One estimate put the cost of running those lights at $4,000 a month.

"They need power for lights and ballast, and they need power to run fans
that help make the stalks stronger," he said. "The more power they use,
the better the quality of the product."

Growers Get Creative

That puts medicinal marijuana growers in a bind. One farmer who supplies
the clinic with affordable weed with names like White Rhino and Blue Boy
said most patients are indigent and need cheap pot to ease back pain or
to stave off alcoholic relapse.

"We do our own grow and cut out the middle man to get decent prices for
our patients," said the grower, who declined to give his name. "But if
electrical costs keep going up, it'll have a tremendous impact."

For growers on the grid, sharp spikes on a residential meter are a red
flag to PG&E and an invitation for trouble. So they get creative.
Sheriff's Sgt. Wayne Hanson recalled one bust where the grower had
installed an electrical bypass device -- the PG&E meter remained stable,
even though the grower was burning up a mint's worth of power.

"By the time we raided the place," he said, "PG&E figured the grower had
stolen $800,000 worth of electricity over several years. It's just like
shoplifting, and the costs were being passed on to law-abiding
customers."

Gradually, many of the large-scale growers moved inside windowless
warehouses in the woods or fake houses, complete with kids' toys out on
the lawn. "The police definitely pushed us indoors," said one
off-the-grid grower, showing off several hundred lush green pot plants
inside his mountain-top home outside Garberville. "It was great growing
it out in the open. But they ruined it for us."

Still, they've apparently adapted to life without PG&E.

Eureka police Sgt. Pat Freese recalled one raid that netted a diesel
generator big enough to power a small hospital. Hanson and Garcia, whose
unit seized 43,000 pot plants last year worth an estimated $14.5
million, showed visitors their storage lot crammed with confiscated
electrical equipment: military-styled generators, one of them painted in
camouflage; grow lights and hoods, bulbs, ballast, and miles of new
electrical wire.

Grave Physical Risks

But there is, said Garcia, a very steep downside to making one's own
power: electrocution. The police training manual, in fact, shows photos
of dead growers, zapped as they tended their plants. "You'd have to be a
PG&E-type electrician to set up some of these systems," he said. "This
is not something you'd hand off to a Kmart clerk."

Some growers may have moved off the grid, but their power costs are
still off the charts: A 1,000-watt bulb costs $50 a month to run 18
hours a day, said Bryn Coriell of American Hydroponics, an Arcata firm
that sells equipment for growing tomatoes and lettuce indoors and
without soil. By contrast, a similar bulb hooked up to a generator can
cost $60 or $70 a month in diesel.

The current energy crisis touches this multimillion-dollar industry in
other curious ways. One grower pointed out that as the cost of
electricity goes up in California, Canadian power has become relatively
cheaper each month. The result, they say, is an unfair marijuana trade
imbalance.

"The growers up there are on the grid with cheap Canadian hydroelectric
power," said the grower. "So we've seen a steady rise in imports from
Canada, and that's caused the bottom to drop out of the U.S. market."

Some off-grid pot growers also fret that diesel costs could rise,
cutting further into their admittedly fat profits. Meanwhile, growers on
the grid, just like residential consumers and businesses up and down the
Golden State, are turning to conservation to help them weather the
storm.

"This crisis is an unexpected factor that we need to deal with," said
Turner at the cannabis club in Arcata. "Some of our growers have already
put a non-peak-hour timer on their grow lights so they're on during the
night when electricity is cheaper."

After all, he said, "as long as those lights are on for 12 hours a day,
it doesn't matter to the pot plant which 12 hours they are."