That is correct, that grass might not be that green after all. A researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has revealed in a report entitled “Energy up in Smoke: The Carbon Footprint of Indoor Cannabis Production” that indoor growers account for approximately one percent of total US electricity use.

A sort of rhetorical question is asked in a summary before the main report, and it reads like this:

What kind of facility has lighting as intense as that found in an operating room (500-times more than needed for reading), 6-times the air-change rate of a biotech laboratory and 60-times that of a home, and the electric power intensity of a datacenter?

Well that was easy to answer wasn’t it? At the end of the day the research is highlighting the inefficient use of electricity to produce the indoor crops.

Each four-by-four-foot production module doubles the electricity use of an average U.S. home and triples that of an average California home. The added electricity use is equivalent to running about 30 refrigerators. Processed Cannabis results in 3000-times its weight in emissions. For off-grid production, it requires 70 gallons of diesel fuel to produce one indoor Cannabis plant, or 140 gallons with smaller, less-efficient gasoline generators.

The report also claims that smoking one joint is roughly the equivalent of running a 100-watt light bulb for 17 hours – if it was grown indoors, obviously.

And what about using solar power, you ask?

Nope. Using solar to power inefficient systems is a waste. A costly, mega-sized solar system to run a bunch of inefficient lights, fans, and chillers in a single house would just give solar a bad name.

Dr Evan Mills, the researcher in question, says that with cost-effective efficiency improvements of up to 75%, energy wastage could be dramatically reduced.

[Source: The Atlantic]