Just minutes after Energy Secretary Steven Chu's highly anticipated appearance before the House Energy and Commerce investigations subcommittee yesterday, Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) vowed that his probe of the Energy Department's controversial loan guarantee program is far from over.

Stearns, who last month said in regard to Chu that he would "bring in the top guy last" to testify, now plans to expand his investigation beyond the half-a-billion-dollar loan guarantee that was made to the Solyndra solar energy company. He believes poor management and continued political interference has put more DOE-backed companies in danger of going belly up.

SPECIAL REPORT

Solyndra, a solar manufacturer that was given a $535 million loan guarantee and touted by the White House as a model for the clean energy economy, has filed for bankruptcy. E&E examines how it got there and what it means. Click here to read the report.

Stearns noted that two months ago the committee asked Chu for information about the financial condition of each of the other 37 loans issued under the agency's various renewable energy loan programs. He said DOE has yet to comply with that request.

At several points during yesterday's hearing, Stearns and other panel Republicans repeatedly pressed Chu for insight into the financial condition of the other projects in the agency's loan portfolio.

"Are any of them in financial trouble?" Stearns asked. "You certainly should be able to tell us that. As secretary of Energy you're monitoring this, you're trying to convince us you're on top of the situation."

To date, two loan recipients, California-based Solyndra and the Massachusetts-based energy storage company Beacon Power, have gone bankrupt. And DOE has said it is also closely monitoring New York-based Ener1, which received $118.5 million from the federal stimulus fund.

In the wake of Solyndra's crash, the White House has called for an independent audit of the DOE loan portfolio. That review, which is being conducted by a former Treasury Department official, is set to be completed by the end of next month.

But while Chu said the department has overhauled its loan monitoring efforts after Solyndra's bankruptcy, he was hesitant to offer committee members specifics about the health of the rest of the loan portfolio because he said he did not want to give away proprietary information relating to those companies.

"We have two loans that are in trouble, Solyndra and Beacon," Chu said. "We believe the majority of the portfolio is in good shape. A large majority."

Chu said after yesterday's hearing that he cannot promise that the program has seen its last default. He explained that the failures of both Beacon Power and Solyndra were the result of rapidly changing market conditions that no one could have predicted.

In the case of Solyndra, he pegged the company's downfall on a sudden increase in production of solar panels by China combined by a quick decrease in demand from European markets.

"So I can't stand before you and say there might not be another rapidly changing market condition that would cause a loan to go into stress," Chu said. "I can't promise everything else is solid."

Stearns said he has little confidence that Chu will be able to keep the program from experiencing additional failures.

"We are going to continue to have our hearings to try to understand what's happening to Solyndra, what's happening beyond all these loan guarantees that are in trouble, but, more importantly, what's happening in the White House with their participation in these loan guarantees," Stearns said.

Political influence?

Stearns said that some of the 185,000 pages of documents gathered during the course of the Solyndra probe prove that political considerations have influenced the operations of the loan program. In particular, he pointed to several emails that indicated that DOE officials pressured Solyndra to delay an announcement regarding layoffs at the company until after the 2010 midterm elections.

Late last October, after Solyndra informed DOE that the company was planning to shut down some operations and lay off staff, an adviser for one of the company's private investors said DOE tried to manage the timing of that announcement.

"They did push very hard for us to hold our announcement of the consolidation to employees and vendors to November 3rd -- oddly they didn't give a reason for that date," the adviser wrote in an email.

But Chu testified that he was surprised as anyone else to learn about that email.

"Something like that was not discussed with me," Chu said. "I would have not approved it."

Chu vowed to have DOE's general counsel look into the matter.

But committee ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said that after eight months of investigating Solyndra, Republicans are reaching to find some sort of wrongdoing.

"Let's keep this in perspective, asking Solyndra to delay its announcement did not put any taxpayers at risk," Waxman said. "It's really small potatoes. We have lost the money, it's unfortunate but there's no scandal, there's nothing there."