The result, they say, of relying on one source of energy - and piping it from unstable countries thousands of miles away leaving it vulnerable to mechanical failure, sabotage and terrorist attacks.
Our Science Correspondent, Andrew Veitch, reports on the black out to come.
Fast forward to the year 2020: Britain's power supplies depend on gas and as the North Sea wells dry up, nearly 80 percent of it is piped thousands of miles from the Middle East, West Africa, and the former Soviet republics.
Until a terrorist cuts the pipeline.
And the country is plunged into the darkness of the three-day week, the economic disaster that was 1974.
That's the forecast today by the eminently sober Institution of Civil Engineers.
Currently Britain has a mix of fuels for generating electricity: gas accounts for 38 percent; coal 32 percent; nuclear power 23 percent; oil 4 percent; and just 3 percent comes from renewable and other sources.
But by the year 2020, coal plants will have closed because of the need to cut greenhouse gases.
There'll be only one nuclear plant left. Renewables will generate a fifth of electricity at most. So the UK will be running on imported gas.
An historic change, says today's report: the country, will switch from being a net exporter of energy to an importer.
To guarantee security, the government should be considering other domestic power sources - nuclear among them - and prices will have to rise to encourage both investment, and efficiency savings.
But the engineers say the Government's plans are, frankly, "short-sighted".
In the long term, if the lights are to stay on, demand for energy will have to be reduced.
And if that doesn't happen - if a couple of decades down the road, the country does fade to grey - well the voters are unlikely to thank their leaders for having twenty-twenty hindsight.
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