House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Darrell Issa issued Energy Secretary Steven Chu a cease-and-desist order yesterday for what the lawmaker describes as an ongoing attempt to interfere with his investigation of the Department of Energy's controversial loan guarantee program.

The California Republican charged that DOE has been working this week to block his committee's access to emails sent from the personal email account of Jonathan Silver, the former loan program chief, about his dealings in that program.

Issa argued that DOE has no legal standing to interfere, since the emails weren't sent from a government address.

"DOE's attempt to delay and disrupt the Committee's investigation has no basis and is unacceptable," Issa said in a letter to Chu. "The Committee requests that DOE representatives immediately cease attempts to deter Mr. Silver or his representatives from providing the Committee with documents and information."

Issa had sought Silver's personal emails ahead of yesterday's hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Subcommittee on Regulatory Affairs, Stimulus Oversight and Government Spending about the downfall of Colorado-based Abound Solar. The company is the third loan guarantee recipient to file for bankruptcy after Solyndra and Beacon Power and has provided Republicans a new avenue to attack the Obama administration's stimulus-funded energy efforts.

Yesterday's hearing came on the same day that the Las Vegas Review-Journal reported that the Amonix solar manufacturing plant in Las Vegas, which received millions in stimulus dollars through a DOE grant, has shuttered its doors after 14 months.

Silver acknowledged during yesterday's hearing that he used a personal email address to conduct loan program business but denied GOP charges that he did so in order to hide overtly political decisions from federal archiving systems and record laws (Greenwire, July 18).

DOE spokesman Damien LaVera said after the hearing that the agency never tried to keep documents from Congress or planned to redact information from Silver's personal emails, as Republicans charged.

"The department has continued to fully cooperate with these investigations, which continue to show that all decisions on the loan program were made on the merits after careful review by the experts in the loan program," LaVera said. "It has come to our attention that staff in the loan program used personal emails. The department has voluntarily provided responsive personal emails to congressional investigators in unredacted form."

But Republicans argued yesterday that DOE's back-and-forth with the committee over Silver's personal emails represents just one way the Obama administration has played politics on the loan program and Abound.

Republicans spent most of yesterday's hearing focused on Silver and current loan program director David Frantz. When Government Spending Subcommittee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) did finally turn to former Abound CEO Craig Witsoe, it was to ask why his company chose June 28 -- the day of both the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act and the House vote on contempt resolution for Attorney General Eric Holder -- to announce his company's bankruptcy.

Jordan wanted to know whether Abound executives had worked with DOE officials to manage the date of the announcement so that it would be buried in the news cycle.

Witsoe said that that date was chosen because the company only found out the day before that a key prospective investor had chosen to pass on putting new money into the company.

"So it's completely coincidental that this just happened to be the day of maybe the biggest news on Capitol Hill in the last year?" Jordan asked.

"It's completely coincidental," Witsoe said.

China's impact

Jordan asked Witsoe why he didn't mention a potential bankruptcy when he appeared before the committee in May alongside the executives of other loan guarantee recipients during an earlier hearing on the loan program.

Witsoe reminded Jordan that in May he expressed hope that his company's fortunes could be reversed with new financing efforts and the development of the company's new high-efficiency solar modules. But he also said then that efforts by China to undermine the U.S. solar market were hurting Abound.

In its bankruptcy announcement, Abound expressed support for a recent Commerce Department effort to push back against those efforts by China, but the company noted that those efforts came too late for Abound.

Last fall, SolarWorld Industries America -- the largest U.S. solar manufacturer -- joined a half-dozen smaller companies to launch a countervailing duty and dumping complaint against China and its domestic manufacturers of crystalline silicon photovoltaic modules.

Commerce issued preliminary rulings in favor of the U.S. companies on both accusations earlier this year, and tariffs have begun to be collected on Chinese imports as the case moves toward its final resolution this fall.

"China had dropped prices below even their own cost that we were unable to compete in that environment, and we simply never expected prices to fall that fast and that far," Witsoe said yesterday. "I've been part of many very competitive industries that have competed with China, and I've never seen anything like this before."

Frantz said that the phenomenon that Abound experienced when it came to Chinese pricing efforts was something that neither DOE nor international consultants engaged by the agency could have predicted.

"It's clear that China has made a decision and has enormously, very heavily subsidized this specific industry way below the cost of the manufacturing of their projects," Frantz said. "It's been a precipitous price compression that the experts not only here in the United States but all over the world could not have foreseen."

Democrats, including Government Spending Subcommittee ranking member Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, argued that the committee would be better served to spend its time looking into China's efforts to circumvent international trade rules in the solar market rather than attacking the loan program and companies that tried to create jobs in an emerging sector.

"I hope that today's hearing will mark the end of this committee playing politics with DOE's 1705 loan guarantee program, and the beginning of us engaging in an open dialogue about how we can help American businesses succeed in this emerging technology," Kucinich said.