The BC Bud west coast hipsters smoke is grown inside by organized crime using stolen power:
How A Big Utility Fought Back Against Marijuana Growers Stealing Electricity
Three years ago I wrote a piece on electricity theft in BC Hydro ’s service territory. The utility serves a huge area, equal to the geography of Washington, Oregon, and California combined. At that time theft was a big problem, and growing. The utility estimated that losses had metastasized from 500 gigawatt-hours (GWh – a gigawatt-hour is a thousand megawatt-hours) in 2006 to approximately 850 GWh by 2013. The total cost was estimated to be in the order of $100 million annually (Canadian).
That number had grown so much since 2006 in part because of the enactment of the Safety Standards Act – an effort to reduce marijuana production in the province by allowing local governments to obtain and utilize electricity consumption records from BC Hydro. If a residential customer was consuming extremely high amounts of electricity, it was a pretty safe bet that they were running a marijuana grow-op. Their associated electric bill was therefore a clear signal to law enforcement that something was amiss.
A study of the problem from University of the Fraser Valley indicated that these grow-ops were becoming larger and more sophisticated over time. The growers were gutting homes and installing high wattage bulbs (typically 1000 kilowatts each), dehumidifiers, machines to increase the levels of carbon dioxide (to accelerate the growing process), and other equipment to cool the buildings. So of course, the digital fingerprint of such a residence would stick out like a sore thumb. Such consumption levels have also led to a risk of fire five times higher than that of a normal residential house. (The grid stability problem is an issue for other utilities as well: to take one case, last year Pacific Power saw seven outages related to indoor marijuana cultivation).
 Image: BC Hydro – somebody else is paying for this
And the trend was getting worse: in 2003, the average size of an indoor grow-op was 15.5 lights. More recent data from 2006 to 2010 indicated the average grow-ops was utilizing 27.5 lights. And by 2011, it was estimated that 52% of the growers were stealing power, more than double the figure from the previous decade. Elizabeth Fletcher, BC Hydro’s Deputy Director of Smart Metering and Infrastructure Programs commented to me in an interview that the industry had completely transformed itself over a relatively short period.
Over time the theft went from being almost small mom and pop – somebody in the basement – to being industrial scale. We have found instances where they have presumably had a qualified electrician help deploy multiple transformers to be able to accommodate the load. This is the agriculture of marijuana… approximately 95% of grow ops were run by organized crime. This is organized crime we are talking about.
The Fraser Valley study estimated the total number of grow-ops to exceed 13,000 in 2010 (2,113 indoor grow-ops were actually busted by the police in 2010). One estimate suggested that the value of the marijuana industry was on the order of $4.2 billion. Clearly, the problem was unsustainable.
So in 2011, BC Hydro developed its smart metering business case, and included a subsidiary business case for reducing theft of electricity to the cultivation of marijuana by 75%. The utility installed 1.9 million smart meters for nearly all of its residents and businesses, and was pulling back real-time usage data from all of its customers. But that data by itself was not enough. It needed to be analyzed and turned into information that could be acted upon.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2016/04/27/bc-hydro-combatting-electricity-theft-with-big-data/#188366841cbb |
