Energy Up in Smoke
Quantifying the carbon footprint of indoor cannabis production and identifying business and policy solutions
What kind of facility contains lighting as intense as that found in an operating room (500-times more than needed for reading), six-times the air-change rate of a biotech laboratory and 60-times that of a home, and the electric power intensity of a data center? The emergent industry of indoor cannabis production results in prodigious energy use, costs, and greenhouse-gas pollution. Large-scale industrialized and highly energy-intensive indoor cultivation of cannabis is driven by criminalization, pursuit of security, and the desire for greater process control and yields. The practice occurs across the United States and in many other countries. The yearly greenhouse-gas pollution (carbon dioxide, CO2 ) from the electricity plus associated transportation fuels equals that of 3 million cars, and a whopping $6 billion annual energy bill. Solution: outdoor cultivation, only.
Cannabis is radioactive enough. Grow it outdoors to keep Diablo Canyon's closure on schedule
The Incompatibility of Cannabis Factory Farming with the Principles of ESG Risk Management and Impact Investment. Journal of Impact and ESG Investing.
Nuances in Parsing Indoor Cannabis use, Comment on “Cannabis and the Environment: What Science Tells Us and What We Still Need to Know” (ES&T Letters)
Energy Use by the Indoor Cannabis Industry: Inconvenient Truths for the Cannabis Industry, Policymakers, and Consumers (The Routledge Handbook of Post-Prohibition Cannabis Research, Dominic Corva and Joshua Meisel, eds.)
Other Goodies
Energy Benchmarking Survey