Energy Up in Smoke
Quantifying the carbon footprint of indoor cannabis production and identifying business and policy solutions
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Small hits: short notes on key topics
New Study: "Energy-intensive indoor cultivation drives the cannabis industry’s expanding carbon footprint." Cell Press: One Earth, February 2025
Washington Post article (PDF)
What kind of facility contains lighting brighter than the sun, 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. The highly energy-intensive factory farming of cannabis was historically driven in part by criminalization but today more so by the desire for greater process control and yields.
In the US alone, the yearly greenhouse-gas pollution (carbon dioxide, CO2 ) from cultivation and associated transportation fuels equals that of 10 million cars, and a whopping $11 billion annual energy bill. This is more energy than used for crypto-mining & 4x that of pharmaceutical manufacturing.
The most promising solution: a shift back towards outdoor cultivation.
Energy use for cannabis cultivation in context with that of other US industries. Values for the non-cannabis sectors include direct on-site uses of fuel and electricity in the production process at US-based facilities. For comparability to other sectors, the values for cannabis include only those associated with cultivation and post-harvest processing, excluding energy embodied in inputs or that from retail activity, transportation, or waste disposal. (For the data and sources, see Mills 2025).
U.S. cannabis production, normalized emissions, aggregate emissions, and energy expenditures by cultivation method and legal status (2023). The higher per-weight amounts for illicitly grown cannabis are driven primarily by 5% of electricity production by off-grid diesel generators and eradication losses. With severe overproduction in the current market, the emissions per weight sold could be significantly higher across all categories, (Mills 2025)
Industry-wide emissions impacts from changes in policy and market structure. Values apply to aggregate emissions from all forms of production (plant factory, greenhouse, and open field) and all segments (commercial/home and legal/illicit), including energy use, cultivation inputs, dispensaries, transportation, and waste disposal (baseline emissions of 44 Mt CO2e/year). “Indoor” refers to conditioned greenhouses together with plant factories and indoor home cultivation. Note that the “full legalization” case does not model the possible effects of relaxing restrictions on interstate commerce or other policies that could be deployed in a legal market. The electrification, solar, and reduced transport emissions cases are technological thought experiments, irrespective of a cost-benefit analysis that would likely moderate these changes. The scenario values are not additive. (Mills 2025)
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