FOR months a profound somnolence has settled over Hinkley Point C, where the government hopes to install an £18 billion ($26 billion) nuclear power plant. On a recent weekend the security guards were not on the gate. Dozens of diggers and bulldozers were lined up as if on sale. A sign hung at the entrance displaying the core values of the project. One of them was “Know how far we’ve come, how far we’ve got to go, and how we’re going to get there.”

In fact, no one has a clue when or how the world’s most expensive power station will get anywhere. EDF, the French contractor, has once again postponed a decision to go ahead—until September. There are growing fears that the French nuclear technology it intends to use is flawed. The British government, which has offered a huge subsidy to ensure that nuclear power helps keep the lights on and emissions down for decades to come, insists it will go ahead. But that conviction is shared only by local villagers, who shrug off the delays as a fact of life. “This is Somerset. We invented the word mañana and sold it to the Spanish,” a female Land Rover driver says jauntily.

The innumerable delays over Hinkley Point matter, though, because they reflect what many consider to be a crisis in British energy policy: the inability to build large power plants of any kind at a time when many coal-fired ones are closing and existing nuclear ones are on their last legs. Britain, once a model of energy deregulation, is now able to get the power it needs only when the government meddles in the market with subsidies and other inducements.

In his book, “Empires in Collision,” David Howell, a Tory former energy secretary, calls it “a very British fiasco”. He blames a combination of EU energy policy and overzealous greenery by Liberal Democrats in the former coalition government for putting Britain at risk of blackouts, pushing up energy bills and making energy-intensive industries such as steel uncompetitive.

But the current government is also at fault for continuing a series of interventions that Dieter Helm of Oxford University only half-jokingly says bring back memories of the pre-privatisation Central Electricity Generating Board. Since taking office last year Amber Rudd, the energy secretary, has offered new subsidies for offshore wind while removing them from onshore wind and solar power. She has proposed 2025 as a deadline for scrapping Britain’s coal-fired plants, which still provide nearly a quarter of the nation’s electricity. By the same year, she hopes to see less government involvement in the energy market, while saying it is “imperative” to build new gas-fired power plants.

Meanwhile investors are leery of investing in big gas plants when there is so much uncertainty about government policy, including whether or not Hinkley Point—which could supply 7% of the country’s electricity—will be built. Peter Atherton of Jefferies, an investment bank, says Carrington, a combined-cycle gas-turbine plant in Manchester, given the green light in 2012, may be the last big gas plant to be built in Britain without subsidies. “Now everyone sits down and says, ‘have we got a government contract?’ ”. He says it is an “absolute dog’s dinner of interlocking policies and interventions—and calling it a dog’s dinner is unkind to Pedigree Chum.”

This year more than 6,000 megawatts (MW) of power generation could be lost, or almost twice Hinkley Point’s proposed 3,200MW capacity. That would lead to potentially the biggest supply shortfall in decades (see chart). On May 6th the Department of Energy said that the gap is the result of low fossil-fuel prices that have pushed down wholesale power prices, damaging the profitability of coal and gas plants. Under normal conditions, it says, the market can cope with up to three hours in which supply fails to match demand. National Grid, the system operator, makes up the shortfall with stop gap measures. But with a 6,000MW shortage, that timespan could increase to 38 hours, it said.

As a result it has brought forward a market-based subsidy scheme that aims to secure temporary supplies to prevent blackouts in winter when demand is highest. It held the first two “capacity” auctions in 2014 and 2015, aiming to bridge a gap in the winters of 2018-19 and 2019-20. Now it has scheduled another one early next year to smooth things out in the winter of 2017-18. On May 9th, for the first time since 2008, National Grid issued a summer alert that it urgently needed 1,500MW of extra power because of a mix of plant breakdowns, a drop in wind power and other factors. It paid one operator £1,250 per MW/hour for its electricity—30 times the normal price.

Such ad-hoc interventions push up energy bills. They have also handed juicy rewards to owners of small-scale diesel generators—a feature of life more reminiscent of countries like Nigeria. To be fair, governments across Europe are facing similar power-generation problems (though few have such a small cushion of capacity). The growth of renewable energy, which last year accounted for almost a quarter of Britain’s electricity supply, is becoming so abundant it is distorting electricity markets. Because it is intermittent, it needs backup supplies when there is no wind or sun. But when there is, it is so cheap that fossil-fuel plants struggle to compete.

Carbon targets are also complicating life for policymakers. One reason the Tory government remains committed to Hinkley Point is to avoid missing its 2030 emissions-reduction goals. Ideally, it should rely more on undersea power lines that connect it to the Netherlands and elsewhere. Last year it imported about 6% of its electricity. However, a vote this summer to leave the EU would make it harder to build more, analysts say.

In the long-run there may be no option but to muddle through until renewables work without subsidies, and backup technologies such as battery storage or nuclear power become cheaper and more efficient. For now, the strain on the grid is lightened by feeble electricity demand in Britain, which is still more than 10% below its level before the financial crisis in 2008-09. But that could change if more people start plugging in their cars rather than filling them up, and switching on industrial plants rather than stoking their furnaces. The country with the cheapest and most abundant electricity will prosper in such a future. At this rate, it won’t be Britain.