Congratulations to Glass House Group!

I’ve seen first hand how dedicated Glass House Brands is to walking their talk regarding sustainability. Congratulations to the team on being recognized for the Sustainable Leadership Award for Energy Use by #CannaTechToday, and to all the winners of the sustainability leadership awards! Seinergy is honored to work with purpose-driven leaders like Glass House Brands to help measure and lower energy use and carbon footprints.

Seinergy began working with Glass House Group in early 2021 to assess the carbon and ecological impacts of growing cannabis in their two California facilities. This assessment included three phases: an introduction to understanding carbon and energy metrics, benchmarking Glass House’s current energy and carbon use, and analyzing Glass House’s data with recommendations for next steps. Seinergy also compared Glass House’s resource use to media narratives and policy claims.

We found both growing technology and location contributed to a much lower carbon impact for Glass House. Seinergy identified a lower carbon footprint specific to the California grid profile, which utilizes more renewables and less coal per kW. In addition, their dutch-style greenhouse with special DYNAGLAS panels maximizes space and sun energy while controlling for temperature and humidity as needed.  Glass House’s greenhouses use very little supplemental lighting. This results in a low electricity footprint per square foot and per gram of final product.

Seinergy also analyzed Glass House’s actual electric and gas usage. We then applied these numbers to facility characteristics and production output.  Adjustments to the input data were made to adequately compare like numbers. For example, one facility had on-site drying while the other did not. Thus, additional energy use was added to the facility without drying to incorporate the entire energy life of the product. The final numbers incorporate full energy implications for their product from seed to sellable product. Seinergy was able to identify the Production Efficiency (output per sq foot of facility) as well as Energy Use Intensity (energy use per square foot of facility) and Energy / Carbon productivity (units of product per units of energy consumed).  See diagram.

According to our data, Glass House Group’s facilities performed far better than other indoor facilities by every metric. However, Seinergy sees a need for a widespread, statistically significant evaluation of actual energy used in controlled environmental agricultural facilities. This would help policy makers, utilities and growers understand how they compare with industry standards.  Absent such an evaluation, Seinergy utilized available market characterization studies such as Resource Innovation Institute’s Cannabis Power Score, the Summers 2021 Carbon Study, and Evan Mills 2012 papers. 

As experts in the intersection of cannabis and energy, Seinergy has been working to understand and evaluate the carbon impacts of this industry, and to influence the innovators to adopt greater efficiencies at their facilities. Seinergy believes all facilities should benchmark energy, carbon and water usage as the first critical step towards managing resource efficiency. Many options exist from simple and free DIY spreadsheet templates to enterprise level data analytics with professional report writing. We can help you take the first step in energy and carbon benchmarking today.

Learn more about Glass House’s sustainability efforts and Seinergy’s benchmarking report.