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.
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IEA: Electricity investment surpasses oil and gas for the first time
LONDON - Investments in electricity surpassed those in oil and gas for the first time ever in 2016 on a spending splurge on renewable energy and power grids as the fall in crude prices led to deep cuts, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said.
Total energy investment fell for the second straight year by 12 per cent to US$1.7 trillion compared with 2015, the IEA said. Oil and gas investments plunged 26 per cent to US$650 billion, down by over a quarter in 2016, and electricity generation slipped 5 per cent.
"This decline (in energy investment) is attributed to two…
