By the time a team of police officers and engineers stormed a disused office block in Wigan, Greater Manchester, on a November morning last year, the building had been abandoned.
Left behind were rooms filled with thousands of cannabis plants: a nursery on the first floor, the growing crop on the second, and leaves drying out on the third. The criminal gang behind the marijuana farm is thought to have fled after the grid operator cut off the stolen electricity used to power scores of LED lamps.
“This was a proper setup,” said one engineer at the network operator Electricity North West, who took part in the raid. “It had a kitchen, television, several beds and even a treadmill. This [was] an incredibly professional set up on an industrial scale.”
The engineer, who asked not to be named, is part of a team set up by the grid company to crack down on Britain’s billion-pound energy heist. Across the country about £1.5bn worth of gas and electricity is estimated to be stolen every year, piling an extra £50 a year on to the nation’s household bills.
The team at Electricity North West began their investigation after fuses started blowing at a local power substation in the middle of the night. After the substation sensors showed that the power load was unusually high, and thermal imaging cameras confirmed buildings nearby were unusually warm, the police were called in.
“It is a growing problem. Good honest folk in this country are paying for this theft,” a second energy engineer said. The engineer also asked to remain anonymous because they routinely work with police to enter homes and businesses suspected of stealing energy to replace the damaged metering equipment. At the moment, their employer responds to 900 calls a month.
Many cases of energy theft involve desperate people struggling to pay their bills as energy debts in the UK rise to record highs. But there are also concerns that energy is increasingly being stolen by organised criminal gangs to power marijuana farms or the servers behind illegal bitcoin mining, loading even higher costs on to bills that are paid.
“The main focus around energy theft is the danger that it causes to people,” said the engineer. “While we’re seeing an increase in case numbers, and energy suppliers are losing revenue, the dangers to ordinary people are catastrophic. People lose their lives every year due to tampering.”
Energy theft involves bypassing the energy meter used to charge a customer for the gas and electricity they use. This can range from tampering with a domestic meter, or digging up and re-routing underground cables directly from the local energy network.
The rising figures suggest there is no shortage of skilled electricians willing to carry out this work for a fee. But there are also online tutorials which have prompted amateurs to carry out DIY interventions, with disastrous consequences.
“We’re seeing increasingly dangerous situations. Our staff turn up in full fire-retardant clothing to deal with tampered meters. It looks quite dystopian. But anything in the house could be live with electricity. I’ve been in homes where people have rewired their meters using wire coat hangers, literally vibrating with electricity and no insulation,” the engineer said.
Gas theft has also ripped through communities. David Garner, the director of safety at the gas network company Cadent, leads a team of engineers who investigate suspected gas theft.
He said: “If you don’t know what you’re doing when you tamper with your pipework, you can create a gas leak which accumulates to an explosive level. All it takes to ignite this is a light switch, and you face devastating consequences for the whole community.
“Two, maybe three years ago an explosion took place which not only impacted the house where the gas theft was taking place but also the adjoining property where, sadly, a young boy was tragically killed.”
In late 2022, Darren Greenham was sentenced to 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to the manslaughter of a toddler killed by a gas explosion he had caused. An investigation showed Greenham had cut a gas pipe in his Lancashire property in order to sell the pipework, and had tampered with his meter in order to steal gas.
“It was copper worth pennies, maybe a few pounds. And for that, a boy’s life,” said Garner. “It’s still something that I find personally difficult to think about. It hit us all hard as an industry. We take this stuff seriously, for obvious reasons.”
‘Criminals are the most inventive, industrious people, aren’t they?’
Last month, a group of eight criminals were jailed by a judge in Liverpool for cutting into the electricity mains and connecting power cables to nearby warehouses being used as marijuana farms by Albanian crime gangs.
The men posed as workmen carrying out repairs to underground cables. But police reportedly became suspicious of them because one was wearing trainers rather than work boots.
This case was far from unusual, according to Paul Dutton, the head of ENW’s gas theft team. “If someone turns up wearing a hi-vis and starts digging in the street then Joe Public wouldn’t really know that anything untoward was going on.”
“We’ve seen people dig up their own streets or driveways to lay their own cables to bypass a meter and connect to the network directly. They might drive up in a van, with the usual barriers and equipment. It’s that brazen,” he said.
Much of the network company’s work in tackling energy theft is driven by the activities of marijuana farmers, he added. “We’re not talking about a few plants under a UV light. It’s cannabis farming on an industrial scale: hundreds of plants, often growing in buildings in the most innocuous of places. People will walk past, day after day, and not have a clue about what’s going on behind the wall.”
The company is increasingly relying on data analytics to monitor changes in the power grid’s frequency to track unusual activity which might suggest a surge in stolen electricity used for marijuana farming.
In Blackpool, more than 1,600 cannabis plants were found growing in the rooms of an abandoned hotel in 2023. Engineers discovered the electricity meter had been bypassed in three locations, including the pavement outside.
In another instance, the owners of a smallholding in Lancashire ran their own cable up the pole of an overhead power line to connect directly to a power transformer. They hadn’t been paying bills to their energy supplier, and had also begun farming marijuana.
“Criminals are the most inventive, industrious people, aren’t they? They find ways of beating the system,” said Dutton. “We see both sides. Some [energy theft] is very professionally done. Others are very poor and can cause very serious problems.”
Across the Midlands, a new source of energy theft has emerged: cryptocurrency miners.
In 2021, West Midlands police swooped on what they had presumed was a marijuana farm after drones detected a considerable heat source consistent with plant heaters. Instead, they found about 100 computers wired together being used to “mine” bitcoin, a process in which computers use vast amounts of energy to solve complex mathematical puzzles. In Leicestershire, a cryptocurrency trader was jailed in the same year for stealing electricity worth up to £32,000 at two sites where he operated bitcoin mining machines.
‘A rock and a hard place’
“No matter what the reason behind energy theft is, it is a criminal act,” said Gavin Straughan, the vice-chair of the UK Revenue Protection Association (UKRPA), a trade association for companies involved in tackling energy theft.
The group is hoping to raise awareness of the dangers of energy theft, while pushing the police to ensure prosecutions are aligned with the potential consequences of energy theft.
“The cost of unidentified theft is borne by all. As energy theft increases, so will each and every honest billpayer’s costs,” he said.
“There are also individuals gaining a financial benefit from exploiting the desperation that people are facing due to the energy crisis by providing misinformation and offering them scams but portraying them as a solution. Much of the time this is fuelled by social media,” he added.
Peter Smith, the director of policy at the fuel poverty charity National Energy Action, urged anyone facing unmanageable energy bills to speak to their energy supplier before taking drastic measures.
“Millions are already struggling to afford their energy bills, even before the price cap rises for a third consecutive time in April,” he said. “Nearly half of adults in Great Britain expect to ration their energy in the coming months, according to our recent polling.
“Sadly, some people are resorting to electricity theft, which is not only illegal but also very dangerous. Anyone who is struggling to pay for their energy should speak to their supplier as soon as possible.”
“This may sound trite but I don’t particularly care about recovering the money, I care about saving lives,” an industry source said. “I felt a huge sense of relief and achievement at the fact that we had saved someone.”
