The electric bill at Marc Rosenfeld's 60,000 square foot marijuana growing facility in Medway is going to be pretty hefty.
“If we can keep it to under $100,000 a month, I think we’ll be in good shape," Rosenfeld said.
The warehouse will feature over one thousand grow lights and a sizable HVAC system to cool things down and control the climate.
Where they can, he said, they’re trying to buy the most efficient equipment possible. He could have used LED light bulbs to bring that monthly bill down, but the growing expert he hired to set things up advised against it.
“LED is not making a dent yet," Rosenfeld said. "It’s simply not proven to be an effective lighting method.”
These are the kinds of questions that are coming up as Massachusetts’ newest industry starts to set up shop. What steps can be taken and what, if anything, should be required to cut back on the industry’s huge demand for energy?
“We are a big footprint industry," he said. "It is what it is. It doesn’t mean that we can’t be efficient while we do it.”
Marijuana was a hot topic at a recent convention of the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association here in Boston. John Morris, the founder of a new non-profit devoted to the topic, told a packed room at the conference that in 2011, one percent of the entire U.S. electricity load—$6 billion in electricity—came just from marijuana growing.
“More recently in 2016, studies indicate that 2 percent of Colorado’s load and 45 percent of all new load was attributed to cannabis growing indoors [in Coloardo],” he said.
The emcee of the discussion was Fred Davis, who runs his own efficient lighting distributorship. Davis points out in recent years Massachusetts has been ranked the best in the country for reducing its energy use.
“Medical marijuana will surely put us back, if it’s all indoor grown, will surely put us back at least one year," Davis said. "When we get to recreational, how could it not put us back two or three years?”
Davis says he wants to see marijuana grown outside, as nature intended. But state law doesn’t allow that, and the industry isn’t eager to go that way since it couldn’t be done year-round here. Also, the plants grow faster when they can continually be illuminated, even at night. And outdoor growing leads to concerns about security and the possibility of pesticides drifting from other fields.
Of course, there’s also the option of greenhouses. Norton Arbelaez is a standards and practices consultant for New England Treatment Access, which grows marijuana sold at their medical dispensaries in Brookline and Northampton. “If you’re cultivating in Arizona, if you’re cultivating in California, if you’re cultivating in Florida the nature of the agricultural process itself will advocate for that type of construction, of a greenhouse construction," he said. "Here, I think the best we can hope for given the limited amount of sunshine that we have over the course of a year is perhaps a glass roof structure, so you can sort of have the best of both worlds.”
Arbelaez said his company is considering doing something like that when they expand their operations. They currently do use some LED grow lights and other energy efficient technology, and he said he’d like to see the state government provide incentives for that kind of thing.
Fred Davis agrees that energy efficiency needs to be on the radar screen of legislators.
“They are going to have a mountain of legislation – of regulation I should say – to deal with on all sorts of issues," he said. "This needs to be inserted as one of them.”
The legislative committee tasked with writing laws to regulate the pot industry met for the first time on Monday, and one thing that did not come up was energy efficiency.
When asked about the issue, the committee chair, Senator Patricia Jehlen, said in a written statement, "Massachusetts has been a leader in green technology and energy policy, and as the marijuana industry evolves over the next few years we will certainly consider the impacts on our clean energy goals."
But because the committee’s coming up with Iaws to govern the industry now, WGBH News put the question to Senator Jamie Eldridge, who’s also on the committee: Will energy efficiency be part of that discussion?
“I don’t know," he responded, "but certainly I think it should be, and it’s certainly something I’ll be planning to raise at the hearings that the committee has begun to have.”
Eldridge pointed to the legislature’s rules for another Massachusetts industry that also used to be prohibited—gambling.
“We put into that law requirements that the casinos had to be energy efficient, had to be LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certified and had to embrace alternative energy," he said. "So it think as you see a new industry come to Massachusetts, including the marijuana industry, I do think that we should be doing that as well.”
With so much still to consider to get Massachusetts’ medical and recreational marijuana programs up and running, it’s not yet clear how much of a priority it will be to reign in the industry’s huge energy demand, before it really starts to impact the state.
