THOUSANDS OF B.C. HOMES COULD BE GROW OPERATIONS

B.C. Hydro Figures Reveal 17,900 Homes With Suspicious Rates Of
Electricity Usage

VANCOUVER--Nearly 18,000 homes in B.C. -- about the same number of
residences as in the entire district of West Vancouver -- use
suspiciously high amounts of electricity, often a telltale sign of a
marijuana growing operation.

Under provincial legislation introduced last spring, municipalities
can request a list from B.C. Hydro of all addresses with abnormally
high power consumption -- making it easier for police and city
inspectors to target growing operations.

Abnormal consumption is defined as any residence that uses more than
93 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per day (the average home uses
31 kWh a day).

In July, the Vancouver Sun filed a freedom of information request
with B.C. Hydro asking how many of its residential customers fit that
definition.

The reply: 17,900. In comparison, there are 17,299 homes in West Vancouver.

Hydro said it was unable to provide a city-by-city breakdown of where
the high-consumption homes are located, because it has not yet
produced any such lists for municipalities.

But a rough estimate based on each city's share of B.C.'s population
suggests there could be 2,500 high-consumption homes in Vancouver,
1,700 in Surrey and 900 in Burnaby.

And Delta -- which has just eight officers in its entire drug section
- -- could soon be getting a list of about 450.

Sgt. Harj Sidhu, head of the Delta police drug section, said dealing
with that volume of tips will be a challenge.

"Is it going to be easy? No," he said. "Obviously that's going to
mean we'll have to come up with some systematic approach to deal with
those numbers. We're going to have to start whittling that list down."

Sidhu said the drug unit may require extra officers to tackle the
list or could risk "burnout" among his staff.

Vancouver police spokesman Const. Howard Chow agreed the lists could
pose a challenge.

"Undoubtedly, if the numbers are huge, it will take a while to get
through them," he said.

Growing operations require massive amounts of electricity.

But until recently, B.C. Hydro, citing privacy legislation, would
only release information on a home's electricity consumption to
police or municipal inspectors if they already had an address under
investigation.

Under the new law, Hydro and other electricity providers will be
required to provide -- to any city that asks for it -- a list of all
addresses in their jurisdiction with high consumption, plus two
years' billing records for each address.

Sidhu said he hopes those billing records will help police decide
which of the hundreds of addresses to target -- since the largest
growing operations also use the most electricity.

"Logically speaking, that's the only way we'd be able to deal with
it," he said.

Hydro and the police caution that not all homes with high electricity
consumption are growing operations.

Hot tubs and swimming pools, for example, can cause increased electricity use.

B.C. Hydro spokeswoman Elisha Moreno said the utility will provide
municipalities with a software tool to help them interpret the data
- -- by, for example, identifying consumption patterns that are
consistent with winter baseboard heating.

Moreno said the utility has so far received only one request for
consumption data from an unidentified municipality and should be
sending out its first list of addresses within the next month.

While police will have access to the electricity consumption lists,
the information can also be used by city inspectors and fire
departments to shut down growing operations without a criminal investigation.