Versant Power has received subpoenas for more than 50 locations suspected of housing illegal marijuana grow houses, the utility company said — and now it’s proposing a controversial tactic it claims could help identify those places faster.
Versant wants a rule change allowing the company to report high energy usage to police in an effort to identify illegal marijuana grow houses, attorney Arrian Myrick-Stockdell said during a March hearing with the Maine Public Utilities Commission.
“The point is that we can identify the location faster than they can,” Myrick-Stockdell said.
The federal government is cracking down on illegal marijuana grow houses, with more than 30 raids taking place statewide so far this year. But the proposal by Versant is being criticized by consumer privacy advocates who believe such a rule change would be unconstitutional.
“Utilities should not be doing that. They have a duty of protecting their customers’ privacy,” Jay Stanley, an American Civil Liberties Union privacy expert, told the Associated Press while comparing a utility combing through customer data to an illegal dragnet.
If the rule changes, once police receive a report from Versant, officers would still have to build evidence for a search warrant because the information from the utility alone isn’t enough for a raid, Myrick-Stockdell said.
If a flagged property is using a high amount of electricity for legitimate purposes, police would drop the investigation.
“So the customer will never know about it,” Myrick-Stockdell said.
When asked what amount of usage Versant would use to gauge whether the utility would take action with police, spokesperson Marissa Minor was unable to provide details to the Bangor Daily News.
A threshold isn’t set for when Versant would call police about high energy usage, but if the rule moves forward, the company would work with regulators to come up with a specific solution, Minor said.
The households Versant would flag would be residential properties that use massive amounts of electricity, where one day’s worth of usage is nearly equal to an average user’s month, she added.
Beyond identifying possible criminal activity, the change would allow Versant to address what it says are safety concerns for customers, employees and first responders.
“Our comments were driven by the serious risks of fire and injury that can occur in cases where residential customers are drawing far more electricity than these electrical systems can safely accommodate,” Minor said.
The illegal grow houses tend to have large-scale electrical service boxes, police said previously.
Myrick-Stockdell also in the March hearing raised the question of whether Versant is currently allowed to divulge customer information to police in cases where an employee has been threatened.
“If a representative of a utility calls law enforcement and divulges the customer’s name and address, it’s not permitted,” Myrick-Stockdell said in his interpretation of the law.
Versant employees are verbally threatened about 30 times in a year, with most happening during storms. About 10 verbal threats related to the illegal grow operations were made against Versant employees in the last year, Minor said.
“While safety is always a critical consideration, we recognize it is not the only one,” she said. “Versant Power takes very seriously our duty to protect our customers’ personal information and does not disclose information without a customer’s consent or an official court order.”
Central Maine Power, the state’s other primary utility provider, declined to tell the BDN how many subpoenas it has received. Spokesperson Jon Breed deferred those questions to law enforcement.
CMP has been subpoenaed in four of the five public federal court cases in Maine so far.
The company cooperates with law enforcement when customer information is requested through a subpoena but CMP does not believe utilities should report customers to police because of high energy usage, Breed said.
In the same March Maine Public Utilities Commission hearing, CMP Director of Billing and Revenue Recovery Mark Morisette offered an example of when the company contacted a customer whose usage had recently spiked for what turned out to be legitimate reasons.
“Come to find out their home was flooded during that weather event back in December and they had a company come in with large fans and heaters that were just using gobs and gobs electricity. So they ended up using 6,000 kilowatt hours in less than a 30-day period of time,” Morisette said.
“And, boy, I would not be comfortable at all if we were to raise a flag on that customer to possibly get law enforcement involved. That does — seems like an eerie line to even consider crossing.”
Linda Ball, CMP’s Vice President of Customer Service, expressed similar concern.
“Personally, I’m terrified of the police. If I were using a lot [of electricity] because something went wrong and they knocked on my door, I’d probably cry,” Ball said at the March hearing. “I don’t want to put people in that situation. It makes me very nervous.”
A leaked federal government memo from August 2023 said it believes there are up to 270 large-scale illegal marijuana grow operations in Maine connected to Chinese organized crime, with the money being used for crime in the U.S. or being sent back to China.
The Maine Public Utilities Commissioners will deliberate on Versant’s proposed rule change at 10 a.m. Tuesday. The hearing is open to the public and streamed online.
