Illegal grow-ops use 1 per cent of total power

"People growing marijuana indoors use 1 per cent of the U.S. electricity supply," the San Francisco Business Times reports, "and they create 17 million metric tons of carbon dioxide every year not counting the smoke exhaled" according to a report by Evan Mills, an energy analyst at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In order to produce some 17,000 metric tons of marijuana this year, Mills estimates authorized growers will use $5-billion US worth of energy. That works out to the output of seven big electric power plants.