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.
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.”