British Isles Backlash

 This morning, The Hill published my article on the fierce opposition to Big Solar and Big Wind in the British Isles. I explained:

Britain’s plans to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 won’t be derailed by high costs, even though Brits are now paying some of the world’s highest residential electricity prices. Nor will the effort be derailed by lack of support from the Labour Party...Instead, the country’s net-zero scheme will fail because of the fierce opposition from rural landowners throughout the British Isles. They are telling the owners of proposed solar and wind projects to take their oceans of photovoltaic panels and forests of giant turbines and put them somewhere the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

 

I published the piece in The Hill to draw more attention to the alt-energy land-use conflicts that are raging around the world. Those conflicts are particularly obvious in the British Isles. As I explained in the article, thus far in 2025, there’ve already been 45 rejections of wind or solar projects in England, Ireland, and Scotland. You can read the entire article here.

Here’s a deeper look at what’s happening in the British Isles, along with two maps on electricity prices that will help scuttle Gavin Newsom’s run for the White House in 2028.

 

 

As shown above, the tally in the Global Renewable Rejection Database now totals 155. The rejections have occurred all over the world, including in France, Spain, India, Belgium, Sweden, Australia, Denmark, Northern Ireland, South Korea, Canada, Italy, Finland, Sri Lanka, Germany, New Zealand, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Netherlands, Greece, Cyprus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Kenya, and South Africa. The backlash has been particularly fierce in England, Ireland, and Scotland, where 29 solar projects and 16 wind projects have been vetoed this year alone.

Screenshot from an August 14, 2025, article in Aberdeen, Scotland’s The Press & Journal. Credit: The Press & Journal

 

The timing of my piece in The Hill was fortuitous, as it coincided with more evidence of the raging backlash against solar and wind in the region. My friend, Stephen Heins, alerted me to an article that was published yesterday in The Press & Journal, a newspaper based in Aberdeen, Scotland. As seen above, the paper’s Will Angus reported on the ferocious opposition to wind projects in Scotland. Angus explains that community councils across the Scottish Highlands “have demanded a ‘moratorium’ over renewable infrastructure.” The councils told local politicians that “no financial compensation can ever replace what we stand to lose” and that “no plan exists to support communities affected by increasing renewable sites.” The sentiment at the meeting rhymes with what I have heard over and over and over again in my reporting on these land use conflicts. At the meeting, one local community council representative declared, “The natural beauty of our home is beyond price.”

As I explained in my article in The Hill, Britain’s net-zero scheme is doomed. It won’t work because it can’t work. It’s only a matter of time until the Labour government will be forced to admit that reality.

Newsom’s Folly

California Gov. Gavin Newsom is running for president. Last month, the movie-star handsome Democrat published a piece in the Wall Street Journal that bragged about the amount of alt-energy used by his state’s electric sector. He claimed that California is “proving that a world powered by clean energy isn’t only possible, it’s probable. More than two-thirds of California’s electricity now comes from clean sources such as solar, wind, and geothermal.” He went on to claim that once his state shares that alt-energy with other states, “our grid will be even more resilient to extreme weather, cleaner, and more affordable.” He concluded by saying America should “follow California’s lead.”

It's almost amusing that Newsom mentioned energy affordability because, as I explained in April, in “Gavin Newsom’s Grid Impossible,” people are leaving California in droves, due in part to the state’s high cost of living. I wrote that “According to U-Haul, California has come in last place for one-way traffic for five years in a row with more people moving out than moving in.” I continued, noting that the surge in the use of alt-energy on California’s grid has coincided with huge cost increases and that since 2008, when then-governor Arnold Schwartzenegger signed an executive order requiring utilities to get one-third of the power they sell from renewable resources by 2020:

California’s residential electricity prices have increased by 18.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. That increase is, by far, the biggest price increase in the US in absolute terms over that period. For comparison, the average price of US residential electricity in 2024 was 16.5 cents per kWh. Thus, just the increase in California’s residential electricity price is larger than the average residential electricity price in the US.

 

I further explained that in 2024:

According to the EIA, except for Hawaii, California residential consumers now pay the highest prices — 31.9 cents per kWh — in the US. And that may understate the actual costs. Ratepayers who rely on San Diego Gas & Electric are paying as much as 68 cents per kWh during peak hours.

 

While those numbers are helpful, a picture is worth a thousand words. And two brilliant maps are worth, well, thousands of words.

 

Last month, Billy J. Roberts, a cartographer at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, published two outstanding maps on LinkedIn that show just how expensive California’s electricity rates are when compared to the rest of the US. As seen above, in deep-blue California, the state’s residential electricity rates are deep red, meaning they are among the highest in the country.

 

The map above shows that Newsom’s state also has some of the country’s highest commercial power prices. The point here is obvious: While Newsom attempts to portray California as a leader on energy, his state is, in fact, a laggard. Expensive energy is the enemy of the poor. Unfortunately for Newsom, he’s still clinging to the Democratic Party’s shopworn playbook on energy and climate. Numerous polls have shown that the vast majority of the public doesn’t really care about climate issues, or claims about “clean” energy.

I don’t make many predictions. But here’s one I will happily make: Gavin Newsom will never be elected president of the United States. And here’s another: Newsom will be lucky to finish second or even third, in the Democratic primaries in 2028.