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.
Except the numbers that you’re talking about are radically different from the numbers they are talking about. What you’re talking about is something that was probably 10 times or 20 times the average consumption, not 3 times. You’re also talking about something where they’re actually was a clear physical danger and crimes obviously being committed.
I don’t think many people would be particularly surprised if the power company were finding people stealing power and calling the cops on them.