BC HYDRO - 18,000 GROW-OPS SUSPECTED

Homes That Show Unusually High Power Use Can Be Targeted By Cities In
Hunt For Pot Growers

Nearly 18,000 homes in B.C. -- about the same number of residences as
in all 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 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. 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, 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, 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.

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.

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

She wouldn't identify which municipality had made the request.

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.