This is probably very, very wrong. So help guesstimate what a grow’s electric usage was! 

You may have seen that there was a marijuana bust in Fieldbrook. In addition to a bunch of outdoor plants, authorities say they found 72 one thousand-watt lights.

Some very quick back-of-the-envelope math: 72 lights were on for 14 hours a day in a 30 day month. 

72,000 watts x 14 hours daily x30 days in a month = 30240000 watts. Right?

Utilities use kilowatt hours (KwH), which is 1000 watts in use for one hour.

That brings us to 30,240 KwH per month. Right? 

We called the Redwood Coast Energy Authority’s Jerome Carmen, who said the average Humboldt household uses 675 KwH per month.

So if our math is right, which it’s not, this grow could have been using 44 households‘ worth of electricity. “A small wastewater treatment plant might need that much power,” Carmen said. 

But what’s the carbon footprint of that? Carmen said that it was roughly equivalent to pouring 2,000 extra gallons of gas in your car per month.

None of this takes into account whether or not they were burning natural gas to increase Co2 (that was new to your grow-dummy reporter) inside.

Nor do we know if they have a rooftop full of solar panels, or maybe were running biodiesel in the generator.

And what about electric fans? Or air conditioning?  

Your job: tell us if 30,240 KwH per month is too high.