According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.
why do they even care? they get to sell more power
Depending on the amount of power they are generating, they could be hitting the limit of production at peak times. The grow houses could also be exceeding the rated capacity of residential equipment.
Around here the power companies will tell you to set your thermostat higher to reduce load on the grid during heat waves. (Or just change it themselves if you opted for a reduced rate to allow them to do so)
Reminds me of the snowpocalypse in Texas a few years ago, where the entire power grid failed because billionaires and office buildings refused to turn off the lights. It was like a solid week of hard freeze, and the “rolling” blackouts were pretty consistently only blacked out in poorer areas. People were shitting in grocery bags, because their toilets were frozen solid after what was essentially an entire week of no power in subzero temps. It turned into an even bigger scandal when people’s power finally turned back on for a few minutes, and they realized their thermostats were remotely being set to like 50 degrees. All while office buildings and the rich parts of town were all lit up like Christmas trees.
IIRC that’s also where the Fled Cruz memes came from, because in the middle of the ice storm, Ted Cruz (state senator) tried to flee to Cancun. And all of his constituents immediately started talking about how he was the reason the power grid was unprepared… I think he pushed to cut/deregulate the grid’s winterization? But then they reelected him, because nothing pairs better than “conservatives” and “voting against your own self-interests.”
All while everyone is racing to build new nuclear plants (microsoft fucking bought their own), Trump dumping money into the pockets of his handlers in oil, gas and fucking coal companies. Read the linkedin (gag) article announcing the new “AI EP” from yesterday–its a literal who’s who of shitty companies CEOs cheering the bill they paid for cheering “responsible AI” which references “non-ideological bias”.
All that is to say, the power companies don’t care–they aren’t shutting off businesses. The dystopian future when hospitals are on generators running off (of course) gas because the coal plants can’t generate enough AI deep fake videos of voter fraud in California is upon us. The senior citizen on oxygen’s power is being shut off before Grok’s so they can make sure the accurate information about the 4th Reich is generated.
If you are not keeping the law around drug production and use your not going to keep the electric box up to code.
When I worked for a power utility, I got called out to inspect a boiling (yes, boiling) power transformer. A weed operation in a house served by the transformer was using so much power for such a long time in the heat of summer that the transformer was about to explode if we didn’t disconnect their power.
It turns out the grow op had illegally bypassed the meter too, so they weren’t paying for the power. Just goes to show there are valid reasons for doing this, even if it’s a bit excessive to report them to law enforcement directly.
Read a horrific story once about one of those falling on a lineman. Like a modern-day version of boiling oil during a medieval siege. It’s pretty fucking crazy we just suspend them overhead all over the place in the right-of-way where trucks and shit can hit them.
You’d think with modern LED setups this would be null and void. It’s quite wild to see a lot of older schooled growers still using sodium lamps and other high heat, high energy lighting fixtures and getting caught, wasting energy, etc.
Now days modern LEDs are multi fold more efficient. You’d also think that if someone was doing bad deeds illegally they’d be more inclined to stick to a more strict standard.
I guess criminals never did have much standards… Organized crime excluded and even then some organized crime syndicates aren’t fully organized in a manner that detection is impossible. They just aren’t a nuisance enough to warrant the big league agencies. Local LEOs are definitely picking up new tech and evolving faster as the money rolls in these last 10 years.
Lighting is only part of the issue. In order to get a consistently reproducible product, growers also try to maintain a consistent temperature, humidity, and airflow. All of which quickly adds up to massive energy consumption. Weed grows best in mild humidity and pretty high temperatures. Which means that in the winter, they end up heating and humidifying the entire house to what would essentially be tropical levels. And in the summer, they’re worried about consistent airflow and dehumidifying. And dehumidifiers eat a lot of energy.
There’s a reason cops use thermal imaging to find grow houses. Under infrared, they light up like a beacon. Cops can just fly a helicopter around town, and flag any houses that look abnormal:
I know. And they do it now days with no warrants in the US which is supposed to be illegal. All other points are very valid.
But generally lights don’t equate heat with modern LEDs is all I was saying unlike old halogen or sodium bulbs.
A lot of growers use basements which obscures a lot of thermal imaging. Including under ground shipping containers, cellars, and more. But your example images are spot on from real people that got caught. I still think profiling should be illegal and there should be some strict laws in place to catch criminals the right ways but rant for another time.
Most modern people don’t have access to all that advanced tech, don’t care, feel it should be legal, poor, average. Not some criminal enterprise. Thanks for uploading the photos though for others to see.
Except the numbers that you’re talking about are radically different from the numbers they are talking about. What you’re talking about is something that was probably 10 times or 20 times the average consumption, not 3 times. You’re also talking about something where they’re actually was a clear physical danger and crimes obviously being committed.
I don’t think many people would be particularly surprised if the power company were finding people stealing power and calling the cops on them.
Thisss!!!