According to a motion the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed in Sacramento Superior Court last week, Nguyen and Decker are only two of more than 33,000 Sacramento-area people who have been flagged to the sheriff’s department by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District, the electricity provider for the region. SMUD called the customers out for using what it and department investigators said were suspiciously high amounts of electricity indicative of illegal cannabis farming.
Depending on the amount of power they are generating, they could be hitting the limit of production at peak times. The grow houses could also be exceeding the rated capacity of residential equipment.
Around here the power companies will tell you to set your thermostat higher to reduce load on the grid during heat waves. (Or just change it themselves if you opted for a reduced rate to allow them to do so)
All while everyone is racing to build new nuclear plants (microsoft fucking bought their own), Trump dumping money into the pockets of his handlers in oil, gas and fucking coal companies. Read the linkedin (gag) article announcing the new “AI EP” from yesterday–its a literal who’s who of shitty companies CEOs cheering the bill they paid for cheering “responsible AI” which references “non-ideological bias”.
All that is to say, the power companies don’t care–they aren’t shutting off businesses. The dystopian future when hospitals are on generators running off (of course) gas because the coal plants can’t generate enough AI deep fake videos of voter fraud in California is upon us. The senior citizen on oxygen’s power is being shut off before Grok’s so they can make sure the accurate information about the 4th Reich is generated.
Reminds me of the snowpocalypse in Texas a few years ago, where the entire power grid failed because billionaires and office buildings refused to turn off the lights. It was like a solid week of hard freeze, and the “rolling” blackouts were pretty consistently only blacked out in poorer areas. People were shitting in grocery bags, because their toilets were frozen solid after what was essentially an entire week of no power in subzero temps. It turned into an even bigger scandal when people’s power finally turned back on for a few minutes, and they realized their thermostats were remotely being set to like 50 degrees. All while office buildings and the rich parts of town were all lit up like Christmas trees.
IIRC that’s also where the Fled Cruz memes came from, because in the middle of the ice storm, Ted Cruz (state senator) tried to flee to Cancun. And all of his constituents immediately started talking about how he was the reason the power grid was unprepared… I think he pushed to cut/deregulate the grid’s winterization? But then they reelected him, because nothing pairs better than “conservatives” and “voting against your own self-interests.”
If you are not keeping the law around drug production and use your not going to keep the electric box up to code.