ELECTRICITY USE SUGGESTS 17,900 GROW-OPS IN B.C.

BC Hydro Enumerates Homes Using Excess Power

VANCOUVER - Nearly 18,000 homes in B.C. 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 BC 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
BC Hydro asking how many of its residential customers fit that definition.

The reply: 17,900.

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.

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, BC 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, BC Hydro and other electricity providers will be
required to give -- 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.

BC 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.

The utility has so far received only one request for consumption data
from an unidentified municipality.