“Their Weed Habit Costs a Fukushima's-Worth of Power Every Year”
Kym Kemp / Wednesday, July 13, 2011 @ 6:19 p.m. / Humboldt , marijuana
A few years ago several Humboldt Co. folk met and decided to change the world (yah, what’s new about that, you ask—well, this time they appear to be succeeding). A few people gathered in a small room and worried about how the cannabis culture had been co-opted by non-environmentally grown indoor pot. They determined to get the message out about the beauty and soundness of growing marijuana organically outdoors in the sun. This new movement has been gaining momentum. The newest media attention coming to Humboldt is touting this “new” sensibility. David Downs of the East Bay Express has done a lovely piece (okay, he missed a few small things but hey, its hard to get Humboldt in a few short visits) that features Tea House Collective (He interviewed me, too). I particularly enjoyed his discussion of the problems of indoor grows. He interviewed Evan Mills, an energy analyst who works for the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory at UC Berkeley.
Working independently this spring, the Ph.D revealed some startling statistics about indoor cannabis and the huge amounts of electricity it sucks up. Indoor pot cultivation generates about $5 billion in electricity bills per year in the United States, he estimated, and most of that energy is wasted because growing indoors is 75 percent inefficient.
Mills calculated the carbon footprint of indoor pot and published it in an incendiary independent paper titled Energy Up In Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production. A member of the International Panel on Climate Change, Mills cares about energy efficiency. He’s worked on everything from data centers to homes, to kerosene used for lighting in the developing world.
“I began noticing the hydroponic and indoor gardening stores popping up all over the place and discovered that the shelves were more densely packed with fans, lights, and dehumidifiers than soils and fertilizers,” he wrote in an e-mail. “As a long-time energy analyst, I naturally began doing the math on how much energy was being used.”
According to federal drug statistics, the annual production of cannabis nationwide is an estimated 17,000 metric tons — with one-third of it being grown indoors. So Mills then modeled what an “average” ten-by-ten foot indoor growing module would produce (.7 kilograms per cycle) and need in terms of power (2,698 kilowatt-hours per cycle). At an average of 12 cents per kilowatt-hour in Northern California, growing four indoor plants to harvest costs about $323 in electricity approximately every ninety days.
California’s indoor marijuana crop alone would fill 600,000 such grow modules — 1.7 million for the nation, Mills estimated. With our current power supply mix, one Medi-Cone joint equals about two pounds of CO2 emissions. It’s like running a 100-watt light bulb for seventeen hours.
The April paper exploded online, with dozens of blogs and newspapers, including The New York Times, mentioning Mills and the study. Mills says that some of the data he published has been misconstrued. “The media has really missed the story and misrepresented the analysis in many cases,” he said. “Nine out of ten reports focused on who to blame rather than what to do about it. The blame often was placed on producers rather than consumers, which is always a dubious thing to do.”
Compared to other energy uses, indoor pot farming isn’t that bad, indoor cannabis defenders argue. Indoor pot only uses one-sixth as much electricity as household refrigerators, they contend.
But Mills responds: “I don’t have sympathy for cannabis advocates who say that the energy use is too small to worry about — it’s not.”
8% of California’s usage sounds pretty significant to me. And, according to the Schatz Energy Research Center, Humboldt Co. residents use 25% more electricity than the average Californian because of indoor grows. This kind of data shocked those early Humboldt residents into action. Today the action is paying off in increased media attention to the problem. Hopefully, tomorrow’s cannabis consumers will listen and move towards a more sustainable future.
_________
Photo of SoHum’s Charlie Custer from the East Bay Express
Related tags: indoor-pot-energy-use
This article gets to the root of these issues.
Outstanding article… and a great picture of Charlie smiling.
Thanks.
Most notably, there is the withdrawl of large amounts of water from our springs, creeks and rivers during the dry season. There are also potential problems with fertilizer and pesticide runoff. And then there is all the diesel fuel to run those ridiculously oversized trucks that many of the most ostentatious growers are so fond of, there’s the siltation of creeks and rivers due to poorly constructed, insufficiently graveled and poorly-maintained dirt roads, and due to some people’s need to drive way too fast on these roads, kicking up enormous dust clouds as they go.
But if people would be willing to put just a little bit of their profits back into winter-water-storage tanks, would take care in the landscaping of their gardens and use of fertilizers, would avoid using harmful pesticides, would follow better road contruction and road maintenance practices, would drive more fuel-efficient vehicles, and SLOW DOWN on those gravel-and-dirt roads, the outdoor growing scene could be a whole lot more ecologically sustainable than it is at present.
In my opinion the most urgent of these items is the need to store winter water for use during the dry season, rather than continuing to suck so much water from the springs, rivers and creeks at a time of year when there is little water to spare.
One argument that I keep seeing is that outdoor bud is not suitable for medical patients because of mold, mildew, pests, and (for some reason they always include this), horror of horrors “random bird poop.”
I would be interested to hear whether you hear this argument as well, from patients and/or from dispensaries.
And whether you do hear that much or not, I’d be interested in hearing your response to that claim.
Here’s a good example of someone making that claim:
http://lostcoastoutpost.com/2011/jul/14/hope-local-weed-industry/
The claim is made at the beginning of the first comment in that thread, by “Mark Sailors.”
NO greenhouse gasses, no run off from used soil dumped outside to leach nutrients into the river. No CEQA required if you smoke enough weed.
Even having to argue about this is a measure of madness. I liked how you and Tyce wrote about it at Hank’s Outpost, and you too, Kym. There are so many things to say against this stuff. The first for me is that any immuno-compromised patient shouldn’t be smoking anything anyway.
No, I’ve never heard a patient, except one on a ventilator, worry about artificial ‘cleanliness,’ though a more accurate word for what pharmaceutical-grade strives for is sterility. That’s antithetical to life, the very ideal weirds me out—but I’d be a card-carrying dirty hippie-sympathizer if they had cards. It’s the slurs and stigmas that get under my skin, but as is so often the case, they’re just marketing.
This can be mostly solved with UV lights and letting cut branches hang in the sun though.
A disinterested third party could collect ten (or more) random samples from ten (or more) random outdoor gardens (please include the biggun’s of SoHum that are preaching the superiority of their “product”) as well as an equal number of randomly collected samples from indoor gardens to analyze.
…it would be interesting to see who would be willing to bet the farm, so to speak, before a real, unbiased study like this is done! CASE CLOSED until then!
…and I’m all about outdoor, btw. I just think “cannabiz” is full of shit and am flabbergasted at the degree to which the shit is stockpiling. Marijuana is still illegal, folks….people’s lives are wasting away in prison because of it. You’re all on the same team.
P.S. your internet habit uses a fuk-u-shima’s worth of power every SECOND. But that’s different, right? Riiiiight.
I don’t have any random sample studies to point to but anecdotally, I know that one lab tester told me that the buds that contained both the highest CBD and highest THC that he had ever tested were outdoor. He said it was technique and genetics not indoor or outdoor.
…that said, your internet addiction contributes to the most resource consuming enterprise the planet has ever seen. It’s worse than TV in both environmental impacts and societal conditioning. And people are wasting away in prison because of marijuana. Something among us is full of shit…not you…but I’m not going to pretend to be nice about it.
I’m slowly closing this chapter of my own life…the internet one that is…again. I’ve been tuned in off and on since it’s inception, and it’s only getting worse. I’ll no doubt tune in down the road but it’s just not healthy…it’s a brainwashing box that you gotta step away from regularly to see just how bad it is. Nobody’s positive spin can change the material reality being created by others that surrounds us, and is very really encroaching on us. Some issues need to be addressed matter of factly, and anger is very legitimate. You’ve talked about the frustration of people writing off your arguments…”positive relations” or whatever you want to call them…because of this that or another…well, as with all things that works both ways. People get angry for a reason…don’t write em off because of it. Your comment on another blog about believing corporate smile-dom over environmentalists blew me away too. I doubt it will ever happen, but if we ever meet I promise I’ll introduce myself. You’ve interviewed a couple people I know in the past for articles, so the chance is there. There’s no substitute for person to person communication. The internet, however, is full of shit.
peace, etc.
It is possible in regards to Richardson Grove that I am just marching lockstep with the Caltrans agenda because my husband gets his paycheck from them.There are quite a few people in Humboldt that consider themselves environmentalists, that don’t get a Caltrans paycheck and do support the project.You do know that Save the Redwoods is not against this project? It is possible for good people to look at the same set of facts and come to different conclusions. I don’t think you are bad because you think differently than me on this. I enjoy your comments (okay, most of the time. Sometimes not so much;>)
In “real life” a lot of my friends are anti the Richardson Grove project and pro indoor grows. My opinion causes them pain and theirs causes me pain. But we don’t stop being friends. (We do try not to rant about the idiocy of each other’s opinions though.) I don’t like disagreeing with people I respect but I’m slowly learning the value of “speaking my truth.” How else can my mind be changed if people don’t know how I really feel? I used to be pro indoor grows for instance. For years, some people I respected spoke of the problems. Eventually, I began to see where they were right and I was wrong. It took me about ten years to come to that conclusion.
This blog is supposed to be about discussion —not about me talking to people who only agree with me. I hope that you don’t take too long a vacation from the internet. This blog will be poorer without your comments. Please do introduce yourself to me. Until then I’ll be looking for someone barefoot and affable…
1. hydro uses hundreds if not thousands of gallons of fert/water mix per grow cycle that must be dumped out, then remade, then dumped out, etc. on a weekly basis. Where does this fert/water mix go? In many cases, it makes its way to storm drains, then to rivers, and the ocean. Adding so much phosphorus to our water system leads to algae blooms and dead zones. Big industry is the main culprit but we’re helping them.
2. Both hydro and soil grows use electricity in large amounts, adding to the demand for additional power plants, usually met by opening new coal power plants. The US is the Saudi Arabia of coal.
In areas of colder climes, large cities and grows where people simply don’t have access to a sunny spot in their yard, indoor is their only option.
So what can we do?
Dump fert/water mixes on land where plants can utilize the nutes, and far from run-off areas that lead to streams, rivers or storm drains.
Always use organic ferts. Synthetic ferts are made from fossil fuel.
If possible, when soil growing, use your summer months to brighten up your Mother plants, do your 4 weeks of 18/6 using mother sun, and transition from clone to start outside in those long warm summer days, which means turning off a few indoor lights, for a few months… depending on the geographic locale.
Above all though, we shouldn’t feel guilty, we’re growing medicine. We simply need to stand back and look at how we do that.