Britain’s energy crisis is getting so bad that the country faces “Second World War-style” rationing in order to keep the lights on throughout the country, according to the Register.

The government is launching major energy reforms to lower power demand and reopen power plants previously shut down to comply with European Union environmental rules. One such reform is that the government will pay factories to “voluntarily” shut down during peak hours when wind energy can’t produce enough power.

The government will also start paying companies to provide their own back-up power and energy producers will be able to “name their own price” for bringing coal plants online that were shuttered due to strict environmental regulations.

EU environmental rules forced many UK coal plants and other fossil fuel-fired plants to shut down. The problem is they were largely replaced with green energy, like wind power, which only produces electricity when the wind is blowing.

Opting to build costly green energy with reliability issues means UK officials are going to look at more demand-side policies to lower energy consumption. Paying factories voluntarily to shut down is just one of those options.

Despite the huge problems, Britain still plans on building more wind turbines and other green energy sources to fight global warming, reports the UK Telegraph. The UK’s National Grid CEO Steve Holliday said plans to pay factories to shut down were “just the beginning” of more policies to reduce energy demand.

“We should be optimistic that demand response could avert the need to build significant amounts of power stations in ten years’ time or so,” Holliday said. He added that people have always had “expectations that the supply will always be there”, but this will no longer be the case with more green energy on the grid.

Holliday added that building new sources of green energy that are subject to wind speeds and sunlight would be much costlier than encouraging people to lower their demand for power.