Well, he might be shooting for growing pot in a closet, but he seems to not have progressed to efficient growing with minimal electrical usage yet. If it is legal to grow it in an enclosed space, i would suggest to him to use natural light in the winter. The short photoperiod induces flowering quickly and the steep angle of the sun in winter gives enough direct lighting hours through south facing windows.
and if he did his vegetative growth under lights in the basement, the waste heat is enough to heat a home in a northern climate.. most varieties do not have strong odor until well into the flowering state, and the better varieties do not have any of the old characteristic skunk odor at all. He seems to be doing it at a very small scale (the picture is of a closet set-up that can be bought online from about a zillion places catering to dorm room closet farmers) which makes it less tricky when pot-averse relatives show up for the holidays.
the photoperiod (hours of light vs. dark per diurnal cycle) is critical to cannabis... it will grow larger and vegetatively as long as one keeps the lights on for more than about 16 hours per day.... if you drop it to 12/12 hours of light/dark, the plant will switch to blooming, with flowers appearing in about 2 weeks of the 12/12 regimen. then 6 weeks after that, voila, if you started with plants with good genetics such as most indica species, one will have a crop worth a few hundred dollars per plant.
The stuff in the press that talks about pounds of bud per indoor grown plant are mostly fiction, it helps law enforcement sell newspapers, but the only plants i have ever seen with that yield are outdoor grown sativa or indoor ones that were vegged for extremely time long periods... it is more efficient to do shorter rotation with many plants than it is to grow just a few Xmas tree sized plants for a year.
Also, the shorter rotation means fewer pest problems, as one can clean up every rotation and sanitize the equipment.
For serious medical growers, much can be done to affect the final product by the nutrient regime... one can amp them up with lots of chemical fertilizers, and they will cheerily take up all of them, but i have found that backing off of that and using things like fish-based organics make for some safe, happy smoke, particularly if one feeds them only molasses in their water for the final couple weeks, then cures them in jars for a couple months... sweet, distinctive smoke, and edibles that can nearly make your socks spin while still on your feet.
Since i know who i supply, i feel it incumbent to give them the best, as cancer patients and MS patients (i only have one person i supply that has glaucoma) have enough other things to worry about. The hard part is that the people referred to me are often closing in on death, so it can be a bit depressing, but i never charge them anything, which i get a particular satisfaction from, since i am doing it totally legally.
Doing it legally almost takes some of the fun out of it. But the federal assault on dispensaries means it will stay interesting... the collective i belonged to got crushed by Holder's boys and girls, and after obama's rhetoric in 2008 about how he would leave the states to decide the issue on their own... grrrrrr, he has assisted the mexican cartels in maintaining control of the black market.
