It's a bit of both. How it generally works is that there are two forms to any of these programs. Policies take different forms, but they are relatively simple. It's basically like your household income: What are your assets coming in and what are your liabilities associated with that? That's called an asset-to-liability ratio. Then the industry backstops with its money, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, any company that is financially distressed and not able to deal with its liabilities. It goes into what is called an “orphan fund”, and the industry then pays for that. They are all administered slightly differently, but they all have the same basic process. I should mention that, as a former energy regulator, I have quite a lot of expertise on the implementation of these programs.
On December 10th, 2020. See this statement in context.