Indoor pot grows strain electrical grid

At Shango Premium Cannabis, employees trim and package marijuana buds while wearing black gloves. It's so they don't contaminate the product. The company's owner, Shane McKee, spent $25,000 installing a water filtration system to reuse water that irrigates the plants, reducing waste.

When it comes to electricity, which his plants use a lot of, McKee said he doesn't take chances. He has a full-time electrician on his staff of nearly 50 employees and he speaks with his utility company and an electrical engineer before doing any projects.

Although recreational marijuana is legal in Oregon and Washington, problems linger from the industry's black-market past, not the least of which is substandard electrical work powering lights at marijuana grow-operations.

Pacific Power, an electrical utility company servicing Oregon, reported Wednesday that indoor grow operations from legal marijuana businesses have taken power grids above capacity, blowing out seven transformers since July, causing outages and equipment damage.

Steve Corson, a spokesman for Portland General Electric, said his company has had similar problems. PGE crews anecdotally report that about 10 percent of their transformer blowouts are from grow-ops. Corson said about 400 PGE transformers blow out each year.

Utility companies are asking cannabis growers to consult power providers before starting home or commercial grow-ops to make sure electrical systems are operating properly.

According to Tom Gauntt, a Pacific Power spokesman, when businesses aren’t responsible, one or two in-house grow-ops on a circuit can overload the local grid, blowing the transformer and causing an outage.

Growers like McKee say they understand concerns of the utilities and the industry is improving. In the past, McKee had blown out a transformer, but now has a much better system and uses special equipment to ease strain on the grid.

Jesse Peters is the owner of Eco Firma Farms, which grows recreational and medicinal marijuana indoors commercially. He said the utility companies aren't wrong when they say growing marijuana takes a lot of electricity. There's still "second-rate electrical work" powering grow-ops, he said.

He said that in the past, he has known people that "cooked" transformers on the local grid powering their grow-op. Those grows, he said, were set up by licensed electricians who may not have been aware how much power growing marijuana uses.

According to Roger Blank, Pacific Power’s director of safety, a small operation with four plants and standard lights "is like hooking up 29 refrigerators that run 24/7."

McKee disputes that number. He said it’s not possible for grow-ops to use that much electricity.

“No matter how I do my math, even if I said I’m going to run one light per plant and grow plants the size of huge rhododendrons, it would never use that much,” he said.

Peters stressed that grow-ops will be good customers for utility companies — it behooves them to work with the utility company to properly install equipment and prevent a power outage. A power outage can spell disaster for a marijuana crop that needs constant lighting. Peters said an outage due to construction forced him to grow on generators for two weeks, a costly alternative.

McKee said the state's regulations are helping cannabis growers do the right thing.

"Ten years ago I didn't have any experts I could go to for regulatory advice," he said. "Now, when the fire marshal comes, we welcome them. We want to get the right permits, use contractors and pay our taxes. We are the only industry asking for more regulation."

gfriedman2@statesmanjournal.com, (503) 399-6653, on Twitter @gordonrfriedman and facebook.com/gordonrfriedman