TIME TO TAKE DRUG GROWERS' POWER THEFT SERIOUSLY

Much has changed over the past decade since deregulation of the
retail electricity market, as the Herald recently profiled -
including the theft of power.

I have one way of curbing utility rates in Alberta; stop organized
crime from stealing power. Every month when you and I pay our utility
bill, we are subsidizing organized crime operations. Outraged? You
should be. Organized crime steals unbelievable amounts of power to
run their marijuana growing farms in houses across our city.

The problem is much bigger than you could ever imagine.

As the magnitude of grow ops has escalated over the past 10 years, it
is not uncommon for police to remove well over 1,000 plants in a
single home. Over the past five years alone, joint operations of the
Calgary Police Service, RCMP and Alberta Law Enforcement Response
Teams have seized more than $372 million worth of marijuana out of
Calgary and area - that's 298,000 plants in 590 homes. Over the past
eight years that I have been working on this issue, 95 per cent of
the grow ops taken down were stealing power. This is a Criminal Code
offence that raises the question as to where responsibility lies when
utility companies know power is being stolen and either fail to act
or disguise it as general line loss.

Gangs could be stealing power right beside you by bypassing the meter
and running huge amounts of power through ballast boxes, set to
automated timers, and powering their personal grid of 500-watt light
bulbs. Organized crime can also monitor their timers remotely,
running high-temperature lights reaching 500 F in 12-hour cycles
every day of the year and harvesting three crops a year out of one
house. An average grow op consumes roughly 10 times the power of a
typical home. If they actually paid for this power, the bill would be
substantial and utility companies would be able to readily detect the
extreme over-consumption of power . . . but they don't.

These large-scale marijuana grow farms, run by gangs and organized
crime, are lucrative and provide them with their primary revenue
source to move drugs throughout the province and North America.
Marijuana is an integral component of the drug trade and the drug
problem many of our communities face, and the ecstasy our kids die
from. If we stopped the theft of power, we could bring organized
crime to its knees.

The problem is that utility companies don't take the theft of power
seriously, or worse, they turn a blind eye.

They refuse to admit to the magnitude of the problem. Their
ambivalence and failure to admit this theft is happening means we
have no idea whether we have 500 grow houses or 5,000.

Whatever the number is, every grow op is stealing power, we are
paying for it, and they are putting kids and first responders in
harm's way. Remember the Citadel fires in December 2009 from a grow
op stealing power? Five homes burned to the ground with two more
damaged. Grow ops are 40 per cent more likely to catch fire than a
regular house.

Rough estimates from experts such as retired Calgary police staff
sergeant Roger Morrison put the theft of power well into the millions
in Calgary alone.

The magnitude of the problem when viewed province-wide is staggering.

When Morrison was on the southern Alberta marijuana investigation
team, he attended and investigated more than 750 marijuana grow
operations and almost all were stealing power. He is recognized today
as a qualified and sought-after court expert, and I agree with his
view that, "in Alberta's deregulated electricity market, there is a
disincentive to reduce generation, and a monetary benefit to increase
it. The utilities are following the rules set in place, but they have
a social responsibility to act."

You are probably wondering how this could be al-lowed to happen.
Utility companies are able to operate in the generation and
distribution side. They sell electricity into the pool from one
subsidiary of the corporation and sell you the electricity in
another. All power produced gets sold into the grid and doesn't
in-cur theft losses at this stage. Utility companies get paid for all
the electricity produced by selling it into the Alberta power pool.

The distribution side charges us for line loss, which is an
all-encompassing figure reflective of theft, inefficiencies and
statistical losses. So whatever is stolen just gets added
automatically to your bill, and the utility incurs no loss. In fact,
the more power stolen, the greater the "sales" of the distribution company.

The threat to public safety is significant and municipalities and the
provincial government must demand this issue be addressed either
through co-operation or regulation. Changes to legislation could
require utility companies to be more transparent about line loss,
monitor their lines for theft and disclose, or even better, make
distribution companies bear financial losses from theft instead of
us. The technology and monitoring equipment to detect gangs stealing
power is remark-ably simple, proven, tested and available.

In two recent community pilot projects, more than a dozen grow ops
stealing power were identified in a few minutes. With the recent
landmark Supreme Court ruling in favour of using this technology,
provincial legislation is timely and necessary to get utility companies to act.

We need to stop marijuana grow ops from ever starting up in the first
place, rather than spending mil-lions in surveillance, taking them
down and dealing with our city's drug problem.

We need better monitoring and accountability of line loss by utility
companies and regulators. We need a smart metering sys-tem that
readily identifies and analyses line loss. We need utility companies
to be socially responsible.

At the end of the day, it is Calgarians who own the transmission
wires and we should be able to demand that we don't want our assets
being used to fund organized crime.

Diane Colley-Urquhart is the City of Calgary's alderman for Ward 13.