[[{“value”:”ByHaley Zaremba– Feb 07, 2025, 6:00 PM CST
The high energy consumption is due to lighting, temperature control, and the current legal framework requiring in-state production.
Despite awareness of the issue, no significant action has been taken to reduce the marijuana industry’s energy footprint.
More than a decade after Colorado became the first U.S. state to legalize recreational marijuana, nearly half (24) of states now have legal recreational weed, and 39 allow medical marijuana use. The country is awash in cannabis. A staggering 79% of Americans live in a county with at least one dispensary. In 2025, the domestic cannabis industry is expected to reach nearly $45 billion, and over three million kilograms of cannabis will be consumed.
As the cannabis industry balloons and cannabis products become ever-more potent, the industry is receiving increasing scrutiny in terms of its impact on human health. Just this week, NPR published a report about contaminants in legal marijuana due to patchy regulation, and scientific reports studying marijuana users have come out indicating links between heavy marijuana consumption and decreased brain activity, adverse effects on memory, and increased incidence of schizophrenia.
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But virtually no attention has been paid to the environmental effects of the legal cannabis boom. And, as it turns out, this is a major oversight. Indoor cannabis cultivation – which represents two-thirds of the domestic marijuana growing industry – uses more energy than all outdoor agriculture in the entire United States combined. By another metric, growing four pounds of cannabis at an indoor facility can consume the same amount of electricity as the average American home uses in an entire year.
Evan Mills at Energy Associates, a consultancy in California, calculates that together, legal and illegal marijuana growing operations use a whopping 596 petajoules per year in the United States. “Consumers are led to believe that this is ‘nature’s medicine’ and that it’s ‘green’ in every sense of the word,” says Mills. “There’s lots of greenwashing.”
Indoor marijuana growing operations do not only use more energy than outdoor agriculture – they also consume a whole lot more energy than other indoor agriculture. Growing cannabis indoors requires 40 times more energy than growing lettuce, for example. A typical indoor grow operation can consume as much as 2,000 watts of electricity per square meter. This is in part because of the lighting and temperature control needs of marijuana crops. But it’s also thanks to the United States’ legal approach to marijuana production and transport.
The staggering energy use of marijuana growing operations in the United States is largely thanks to the same patchwork legislative approach that NPR blamed this week for unwelcome contaminants in your legally purchased cannabis. Legislation that makes crossing state lines with marijuana illegal means that each state must grow its own marijuana crop, which in turn “deprives them of the scale that makes other industries more efficient,” according to reporting from Politico.
Scientists and policymakers have been aware of the irresponsible scale of energy use by the marijuana industry for years. Nearly a decade ago, the National Conference of State Legislatures published a brief on the then-nascent industry which found that “the average electricity consumption of a 5,000-square-foot indoor facility in Boulder County was 41,808 kilowatt-hours per month, while an average household in the county used about 630 kilowatt hours.” The report went on to say that the lighting used in these operations is comparable to that in a hospital operating room. That means they’re 500 times brighter than recommended reading light levels.
But despite more than a decade of research on the issue, no meaningful action has been taken to curb energy consumption in the sector. As a result, the greenhouse gas footprint of legal marijuana growing operations is huge, and expanding. Major federal policy changes will be necessary to curb this issue, but this poses a major legislative challenge, as marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. However, in an era of rapdily increasing energy demand from data centers and increasingly tight supply, tackling such needless waste becomes increasingly critical for the country’s energy security – a bipartisan priority.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
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“}]] Indoor cannabis cultivation in the United States consumes more energy than all outdoor agriculture combined, leading to significant environmental concerns and raising questions about the sustainability of the legal marijuana industry. Read More
