Profit

What is role of private enterprise in keeping the lights turned on? Is it really their job, or is it the role of government.

Take the view, with Russia having all the gas (and having to pipe it a long way to get to us), that we don't want to rely overly heavily on gas power stations.
Think about our inability to store electricity (with more than a 2% round trip efficiency offered by pump storage) and you start looking at building coal power stations, the only remaining type of power station where the output can be changed on demand, to help smooth out renewables output and keep the lights on.

What if the government then insisted that all new coal stations were all "capture ready" (i.e. able to be retro fitted with CCS at minimum cost), or even that they were built with CCS technology.

What would industry do - would they build the CCS coal plant knowing it wasn't going to be that profitable, or would they build more and more gas plants - where they could use their money to make more profit than the profit they would make with the coal power stations.

Somehow I'm worried that they would choose gas, taking the view that its down to government, not industry, to keep the lights on.