GROW HOUSES: THE COST AND THE CARBON

ARCATA - The ways that marijuana grow houses suck the life out of
neighborhoods are well documented. What's not readily apparent is the
amount of electricity they're sucking out of the electrical grid, or
the impacts that's having on other utility customers and the environment.

As with other public and private institutions affected by Arcata's
exploding marijuana industry - realtors, landlords, the fire
department, police and the City - the Pacific Gas & Electric Company
(PG&E) has been caught unawares by the phenomenon and is behind the
curve in addressing it.

Unanticipated Consequences

Recent events have highlighted new issues surrounding residential
grow house energy consumption:

. A Sunny Brae resident turns on his power saw and his lights dim.
On calling Pacific Gas & Electric Company's customer service line,
he's told that "all the grow houses on your block are maxing out the
transformers."

Officially, PG&E denies the statement. A PG&E spokesman says that the
biggest new draw on suburban electrical power has come with the
advent of home offices, with all their computers and fax machines.

. Last Thursday, for the second time in two months, a transformer
fails on Eye Street. PG&E trucks arrive and work through the night,
restoring power the following morning. Suddenlink Communications and
AT&T trucks also arrive to repair collateral damage to their lines.

Remarks a resident: "Sure is a lot of manpower and money for repeated
damage due, no doubt, to the abundance of grow houses drawing power
up and down the street. The last time this happened, the PG&E guy
said that's all he does is go around fixing damage caused by
excessive power drains caused by grow houses."

PG&E has no figures available for Arcata's per capita electrical
usage as compared with other communities.

. On June 4, individuals responsible for other grow houses in Arcata
were sentenced. Those homes had consumed 4,415 to 6,380 kilowatt
hours of electricity monthly. A typical non-growing apartment dweller
might consume under 300 kWh; a family home under 1,000 kWh.

Since its two 200-amp electrical meters face his home, a Ninth Street
resident tracks electrical usage at his neighbor's grow house. The
house - later raided by the Drug Task Force - consumes a whopping
10,311 kilowatt hours of electricity per month.

City Energy Specialist Beckie Menten projected Arcata's
non-governmental carbon release at roughly 130,000 tons per year. But
that doesn't (yet) factor in the estimated 800 to 1,000 grow houses
consuming multiple times the power of a human-occupied home.

. Following the $55,000 fire in her Alice Avenue house last October,
LaVina Collenberg receives a $558.06 bill for the residual balance
her cannabis grower tenants owed. On being told the circumstances of
their departure, PG&E forgives $359.25 of the bill.

But then, Collenberg discovers that while the tenants' multi-room
"cooperative" grow operation was burning up $1,500 per month in
electricity, they were paying less than half that cost. Thanks to a
PG&E subsidy for persons with debilitating or life-threatening
medical conditions, some $800 of the $1,500 bill was being paid for
by the utility - that is, other ratepayers.

Some five Prop 215 recommendations, all signed by well-known
215-friendly physicians Dr. Ken Miller and Dr. Hany Assad, were
posted on the wall of the burned home to legitimize the cannabis
cooperative. No arrests or charges were made.

In full production, the grow house might have netted its renters
upwards of $150,000 yearly in commercial cannabis sales. "They told
me [the program] was for people with low income and medical reasons,"
Collenberg said of PG&E.

PG&E

PG&E spokesperson Jana Morris said the utility respects the privacy
of its customers, and doesn't report homes with extraordinary power
consumption unless asked by law enforcement.

Morris said she wasn't aware of any PG&E standards for safe indoor
cannabis growing. She said the utility sometimes asks for proof of
income for enrollees in its CARE Program for low- and fixed income
residents. Those who don't respond have been dropped.

But PG&E, Morris said, has no way of ascertaining customer income not
reported to the Internal Revenue Service. Nor can it disclose
customers' medical status.

Efficiency

Whether or not PG&E addresses the problem, the more-nimble City and
other local energy mavens are moving on it.

"We're trying to look into what can be done to improve safety, which
would involve less energy consumption," said Dana Boudreau, program
manager with the Redwood Coast Energy Authority (RCEA).

With much of the energy in conventional lighting burned up as heat,
efficiency and safety are much enhanced with the use of tuned
Light-Emitting Diode (LED) lamps. Their use for agriculture is not
widespread, but coming along.

Besides efficiency, LED lights can be optimized to deliver energy in
specific bandwidths best used by lettuce, or tomatoes - or marijuana.

Just as pornography helped push the widespread acceptance of home
VCRs and later, improvements in Internet bandwidth, cannabis
cultivation might help popularize and bring down the cost of LED grow
lights for agricultural use.

At the behest of alternative energy enthusiast and Planning
Commissioner Michael Winkler, Arcata's Energy Committee will work
with RCEA to develop standards for indoor grows. "My impression is
that marijuana growing takes a tremendous amount of energy," Winkler said.

One possibility is having growers allow experts to do energy audits
on their installations and offer options for upgrades to improve efficiency.