Does your marijuana grow contribute to global warming?
When I take an evening walk in Arcata, the wind wafts the skunky scent of the underpinning of our local economy. Until I talked with one of my grower friends, I didn’t realize that by rights I should be inhaling the fumes of burned natural gas – 50 percent of California’s electricity comes from natural gas fueled power plants.
Pot growing uses a lot of electricity. In fact, the average indoor grow operation uses five times as much electricity as the average house. Most marijuana grow operations exist on the fringes of legality, so no one is targeting them for rebates on high efficiency lights, workshops on proper ventilation, or offering professional advice on how to time their grow to reduce their utility bills. Today and now, this needs to change.
So clip this article out, pass it to your grower friends, and remind them that with simple changes they can save enough in utility bills to extend their winter vacation in Hawaii by a few weeks, all while reducing global warming.
The first thing indoor growers need to change is the way they calculate productivity. According to a grower friend of mine, most growers use the rough calculus of: “two pounds per light and you’re rocking, one pound a light and you should get out of the business.” The problem is that this gross generality ignores the many different types and efficiencies of grow lights.
The better way to think about this is how many pounds per watt hour of electricity consumed – that gets you looking at utility bills, air pollution, and energy efficient equipment. O Anonymous Grower, now that you’re thinking more carefully about productivity, here are the steps you should take:
1. Trade out your 1,000 watt high pressure sodium bulbs for 600 watt hps bulbs: 1,000 watters produce 10 percent less light per watt compared to 600 watt bulbs. To illustrate how huge this is, let’s assume you need 3,000 watts of hps lights – if you use three 1,000 watt bulbs instead of five 600 watt bulbs (both add up to 3000 watts) you’re wasting $63 per grow cycle on electricity and spewing 38 pounds of carbon into the atmosphere. If you’ve got a garage full of lights, or a hollowed out house, that adds up fast to many thousands of dollars.
2. Ditch the magnetic ballast lights and install digital (also called electronic) ballasts for each bulb. For the same amount of light they save you $45 a year per bulb and save everyone the nine pounds of carbon burned into our atmosphere, per bulb, for each grow cycle.
3. Pony up $277 to PG&E, get a time of use meter and request the Residential E-6 time of use rate. This gets you set up to save some serious money by setting your lights to run during “off peak” hours. Quick background – during the summer all the dirtiest burning electricity plants are fired up between noon and 6 p.m. to meet the enormous air conditioning demand in California. If you’re burning your lights then, you’re part of the problem. If you get a time of use meter, you’ll pay 10-15 percent less by running your lights during off-peak hours because they charge you less. Take a look at your electric bill – if you shave 10-15 percent off, you’ll save hundreds or many thousands of dollars a year. More importantly, you’ll be reducing the demand for the old, dirty diesel generators that fire up to help you grow during the highest demand time of day.
Even if you don’t get it together to get a new meter (just call PG&E at 1 800-743-5000 and ask for service planning), only run your lights after 6 p.m. until noon the next day, and try to run them 9 p.m. to 9 a.m. – that’s when the cleanest burning plants are online. There’s enough hours left over for both vegetative and flowering growth cycles, so no worries about depriving your plants.
4. The last step is installing PV panels and reducing your demand on California’s grid (50 percent natural gas, 16 percent nuclear power, 13 percent salmon blocking dams, 11 percent coal…). The great thing about having enormous electricity bills is the payback for PV is much faster – instead of taking 10 to 15 years, it takes 5 years and then your pv system is making you money. We’ve got terrific solar installers locally who’ve helped many indoor growers cut their consumption.
A closing thought – isn’t it ironic that so much natural gas and coal are burned to produce a plant grown to be burned?
– Sean Armstrong
www.freetheplant.org/blog/marijauana-news/does-your-marijuana-grow-contribute-to-global-warming/ |
