SMART METERS TO NIP ILLEGAL PRACTICE IN THE BUD

BC Hydro's New Digital Technology Will Be Able To Detect Marijuana
Growing Operations

One of British Columbia's biggest underground industries could find
itself short-circuited by a BC Hydro technology upgrade.

Hydro is moving ahead with a plan to replace mechanical electricity
meters with smart meters across the province that are expected to make
it a lot tougher for indoor marijuana growers to conceal their operations.

Smart meters represent the first major upgrade on conventional analog
electricity meters in a half century. Hydro last month issued a
request for proposals for companies to bid on installation of new,
digital meters as well as the accompanying hardware and software, to
serve all of its customers by 2012.

The principal benefit of the upgrade is to allow Hydro to better
manage its electrical grid.

For example, Hydro will receive instantaneous reports of blackouts
rather than waiting for customers to phone them with the
information.

However, Hydro is touting detection of electricity theft as a
significant side benefit for its customers.

Electricity theft was estimated in 2006 to cost Hydro $30 million per
year -- which would work out to at least $40 million with today's
two-tier electricity rate -- equivalent to a one-percent rate hike.

"At the market value of [purchasing] new energy supply, the cost to
our legitimate customers would be significantly more -- even if the
total quantity of gigawatt hours stolen has not increased since 2006,"
said Cindy Verschoor, Hydro smart meter program communications leader,
in an e-mail.

"The smart metering and infrastructure program will help to identify
theft where and when it is occurring and mitigate impacts on
legitimate ratepayers."

Illicit marijuana production in B.C. has been estimated to have an
annual retail value of between $4 billion and $5 billion.

Conventional wisdom holds that residential-based grow operators have
either tampered with their existing meters or rewired nearby
distribution power lines in order to mask the large volume of power
they need to run the lights that serve their indoor nurseries.

In a recent interview, a senior executive with a B.C.-based company
that has already installed millions of smart meters for utilities
around North America said that its workers immediately detect illegal
electricity consumption when they attach the new meters to the outside
of homes and commercial businesses.

It's a side-effect of the installation, Corix Utilities (U. S.)
vice-president and general manager Kevin Meagher said.

"We are verifying first of all ... is the system is safe? Is that
little box on the side of your house safe? Is it grounded? Are there
the right voltages based on the [customers'] records and so forth?
That's all part of the installation process. We are testing all of
that," Meagher said.

"How we find these [illegal] things is that we will get a back-feed
that tells me there is power coming from somewhere else on this
premise through the system. That's usually an indicator that there is
a grow house or something else on it."

Hydro won't divulge specific details on how smart meters will detect
theft, but Verschoor acknowledged that the Crown corporation expects
that tampered meters will be discovered by contractors during the
initial installation process.

"While evidence of electricity theft will be reported to BC Hydro, the
smart meter installers are not going to be conducting investigations
or intruding on customer privacy," Verschoor said.

"In general, theft detection will involve accurately measuring how
much electricity is going into an area [such as a neighbourhood] and
that data will be compared to metered consumption from customers in
the area.

"This is akin to a retail chain comparing how much inventory is
delivered to each store by how many units are sold at the cash
registers in that store."

She added that the new system will give Hydro better "visibility" of
its grid.

"We can determine sources of energy loss from a variety of causes,
including theft."

Discussion board participants on cannabis culture sites across the
English-speaking world have been expressing a degree of paranoia about
the new technology, with similar meter installations proceeding in
many countries.

Advocates of legalizing marijuana, meanwhile, think the grow
operations most likely to be detected by the new meter technology are
family enterprises.

"Prohibition breeds creativity for getting around obstacles and law
enforcement, so there will be ways for large-scale growers to go
undetected," Jodie Emery said in an e-mail.

Emery's husband is Marc Emery, an outspoken advocate of pot
legalization now serving five years in a U.S. penitentiary for a mail
order business that shipped marijuana seeds from Canada to the United
States.

"They can just get generators, or buy entire gas stations (as we've
seen done in the past), or use new LED lighting technology, or grow
smaller crops in more locations, which actually spreads the problem
out and makes it harder to detect," Jodie Emery said.

"The most dangerous aspect of the smart meter program is that it means
small-scale, mom-and-pop indoor gardens will be more likely to be shut
down, whereas organized crime can afford the techniques and technology
to avoid detection (in the ways I outlined above). So it puts more of
the cannabis market into the hands of gangs, and out of small-scale
personal gardeners.

"No matter what BC Hydro does with smart meters, grow ops will never
go away unless cannabis prohibition ends."