"Growing weed inside uses about 1 percent of U.S. energy and pollutes more than cryptocurrency mining. There’s a better way to fuel America’s high."
"In 2010, an energy researcher named Evan Mills was surprised to walk into a plant nursery near his Mendocino, California, home and find, among the seedlings and bags of soil, a display of gigantic 1,000-watt lightbulbs — a more powerful version of bulbs commonly used to light highways at night.
The federal government rarely funds research on marijuana — a substance it officially ranks as more dangerous than fentanyl, cocaine and meth — let alone its energy use. So Mills, then a senior scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, spent nights and weekends outside of work on a years-long quest to build what many growers, regulators and researchers consider the most complete model of the energy it takes to power the American cannabis industry.
What he found — after interviewing grow-light sellers, reading trade journals and equipment manuals, poring over crop-yields analyses and case studies of growers’ energy use, and scouring law enforcement reports — is that together, legal and illegal cannabis growers use about 1 percent of all American energy. That’s more than cryptocurrency mining or all other crops combined, according to a paper Mills published in February, an update to his original 2012 study."
Nicolás Rivero reports for the Washington Post March 23, 2025.
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