In December 2020, a Chinese immigrant named Yongliang Deng from the New York City borough of Queens purchased a single-family house in the small Penobscot County town of Eddington. An electric transformer outside the house failed five months later, after power consumption increased nearly 1,000% in a single month.

Versant Power quickly dispatched a team of workers to install a new 50,000-volt transformer outside 200 Clewleyville Road. The power company noted internally that the “[c]ustomer has a grow and added stuff to his house,” according to subpoenaed power records.

Power use at the house continued climbing dramatically over the next three years, with electric bills reaching as much as $13,000 a month.

The Eddington grow house was not unique. All of the roughly 50 illegal cannabis grow houses busted across Maine have consumed huge amounts of power through makeshift modifications made to the homes’ electrical systems by the property owners.

The home at 200 Clewleyville Road had been identified by Versant as a marijuana grow house just months after Deng purchased the property and years before law enforcement began cracking down on the operations this year, company records show.

The company says it legally couldn’t inform police of the operation under current privacy laws.

Illegal marijuana grow houses have become a pervasive issue in rural Maine, where Chinese transnational criminal organizations have purchased anywhere from 100 to 700 single-family homes, hollowed them out and converted them into cannabis cultivation facilities, sometimes growing several thousand plants at a time.

“Just because we see a customer’s usage may be indicative of this sort of behavior, there’s nothing we can do about it. Our hands are really tied,” Versant communications manager Judy Long said in October. “The PUC ruled that customers have a right to have that information kept private.”

Electricity use at the Eddington grow house continued rising dramatically after Versant replaced the transformer, climbing to over 22,000 kilowatt hours and a monthly bill of more than $4,000 by August 2021.

The average Maine household consumes about 550 kilowatt hours a month. The Clewleyville Road grow house often consumed more than that every day.

Between the house and detached garage, Deng was paying Versant as much as $13,000 a month for nearly three years.

While cultivation slowed through 2022, Deng was paying more than $13,000 and consuming over 32,000 kilowatt-hours of energy between 200 Clewleyville’s residence and garage by January 2024.

In total, Deng paid more than $22,000 in electric bills in 2021, more than $19,000 in 2022, and nearly $95,000 in 2023.

Information about Deng’s power usage was included in a federal affidavit unsealed last week and written by U.S. Department of Homeland Security special agent Daniel Zaehringer.

“Throughout both the house and the garage, there was electrical wiring that was exposed,” the affidavit reads. “In the house and the garage, there were containers that were filled and had tubes leading out that appeared to be used to irrigate the marijuana plants.”

Versant, which serves about 165,000 customers in eastern and northern Maine, can identify marijuana grow houses “with a high degree of certainty,” the company told state regulators.

The power company is able to identify high-consumption residences with “improper customer installations, extremely high energy consumption, and other commercial activities and installations” as cannabis grow houses, but cannot report them to law enforcement without violating Maine customer privacy laws.

Versant pushed to change that law this year, but the proposal was unanimously voted down by the Maine Public Utilities Commission over privacy concerns.

“When we started noticing an uptick in this sort of behavior, we researched it and put it forward for the commission to decide,” Long said. “We are not, by law, allowed to do anything with that information.”

Law enforcement raided the Eddington grow house in April this year, finding more than 550 mature cannabis plants and bags of processed marijuana inside the home and detached garage. The first step in the federal investigation of the site was a subpoena requesting records of electricity consumption.

“I know based on my training and experience that large amounts of electrical power are needed in support of indoor marijuana cultivation, due to the use of artificial lighting, heat pumps, distribution fans, air conditioners and humidifiers,” Zaehringer wrote of 200 Clewleyville Road.

FAMILIAR THEMES, DIFFERENT HOMES

Similar patterns have presented themselves at dozens of grow houses across the state, including at 571 Thurston Hill Road in Madison.

The home was purchased in May 2022 by Jiamin Liao, a Chinese national with a registered address in Flushing, New York, a neighborhood in  Queens and home to New York City’s largest Chinatown and Chinese community.

Just like the Eddington grow house, power use skyrocketed within months of Liao’s purchase.

The Thurston Hill grow house went from consuming 111 kilowatt hours of energy in June 2022 to over 12,000 by January 2023. Power consumption peaked in April 2023, when the home consumed nearly 19,000 kilowatt hours of energy and was billed nearly $3,500.

The grow house’s electricity was supplied by Central Maine Power Co., the state’s largest utility. The company supplies electricity to more than 2 million customers throughout central, southern and western Maine.

Liao paid more than $30,000 in CMP bills while cultivating marijuana in Madison in 2023.

Unlike Versant, CMP says it is unable to identify illegal growing operations they provide power to.

“CMP is not able to distinguish whether these high (usage) users are associated with illegal activity or not, simply that their usage is high compared to the average residential customer,” the company wrote to the PUC in April.

CMP billed over 3,000 residences that used more than 10,000 kilowatt hours a month in 2023, including 603 “unique high usage accounts” that were billed more than $16.9 million that year, the company said.

The company argued against changing the PUC’s privacy laws, saying that current standards are stringent enough and that lawful consumers of large amounts of power may unfairly become the focus of future law enforcement investigations.

“CMP does not consider it appropriate for utilities to speculate about whether or not customers are engaging in illegal activity based simply on their usage levels or patterns,” the company wrote.

Liao continued consuming as much electricity as about 30 Maine homes and paying thousands of dollars in bills each month until the Madison property was raided in March 2024 by Somerset County Sheriffs and agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Homeland Security.

Over 550 mature cannabis plants were seized inside, along with other “drug paraphernalia and documentation.” An affidavit written by DEA special agent Kristopher Sullivan detailed the modifications Liao had made to the property.

“Inside the residence there were several rooms that were currently being utilized to grow marijuana. The residence also had several security cameras installed, on both the interior and exterior,” Sullivan wrote. “The basement had several rooms where walls had been built and reflective material was hung to aid in the marijuana cultivation process.”

Liao was arrested and charged with cultivation of marijuana and unlawful trafficking in scheduled drugs before being released on $10,000 bail later that day.

Liao admitted to authorities that she grew and harvested cannabis at the Madison home and said she received money from her family to purchase the house, along with another property in Norridgewock also used to process marijuana.

Liao told officers she “liked the way it smelled” and described the cannabis plants as “like my babies,” saying it made her happy when they grew, according to Sullivan’s affidavit.

PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY OR PRIVACY INVASION?

Law enforcement authorities estimate that as many as 700 grow houses may have operated in Maine over the last five years. Questions remain about utility companies’ knowledge of the illegal grows prior to the first raids in January 2024, the money made by supplying them with power, and the role they should play in curtailing Maine’s grow houses.

Utility companies’ ability to identify the legal status of cannabis operations has been complicated by an operational shift, from selling to out-of-state black markets to Maine’s medical marijuana market instead, as the latter has some of the loosest licensing laws in the nation and a lack of mandatory chemical, mold and contaminant testing.

Over 120 alleged illegal grow houses have been issued legal cannabis caregiver licenses by Maine’s Office of Cannabis Policy since 2023, a Morning Sentinel investigation uncovered, potentially allowing illegal growers to evade detection from law enforcement, utility companies and cannabis regulators alike.

Ultimately, the PUC’s three commissioners voted unanimously against Versant’s proposal to change the commission’s privacy rules, saying the changes could violate privacy and confidentiality laws, and that investigating illegal cannabis operations is law enforcement’s job.

“It would not be appropriate for utilities to report high-usage customers as Versant has proposed,” PUC Chairman Philip L. Bartlett II said in August. “Such customers may have other legitimate reasons for high usage and using such broad criteria would likely result in the privacy of many innocent customers being violated.”

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