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Home 🌿 Marijuana Business News 🌿 Marijuana growers in the US are using up $6 billion a year in electricity 🌿

Marijuana growers in the US are using up $6 billion a year in electricity

Submitted by Marijuana News on Thu, 12/03/2015 - 09:19

As more states legalize marijuana in the US, pot cultivation is sucking up an ever-growing amount of energy from the grid.

Since most of the legal weed is grown indoors, the pot industry burns through large quantities of electricity used to power lamps, ventilation systems, and air conditioning. A square foot of planting requires some 200 watts of electricity (pdf, p. 20), about the same as a data center, according to a report this year in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law.

The paper notes that marijuana plantations soak up at least 1% of the country’s electricity at a cost of $6 billion a year.

The US marijuana business has exploded in the wake of state efforts to legalize the drug. Sales increased 74% in 2014 to $2.7 billion, according to ArcView Group, which conducts research on the cannabis industry.

If all states legalized pot, the amount the industry...

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