Abengoa Solar last week received a second loan guarantee from the Department of Energy under the stimulus-backed program that once boosted now-bankrupt solar panel manufacturer Solyndra Inc.

But the rules have changed since Abengoa got its first $1.45 billion loan guarantee in 2009 for the 250-megawatt Solana solar farm in Arizona. For the company's $1.2 billion guarantee -- for a concentrated solar farm in the Mojave Desert (Greenwire, Sept. 16) -- DOE warned Abengoa officials that the project would be under much greater scrutiny than the first time around.

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DOE, company executives said, told them to "throw out" whatever they had learned from the first application because the process had changed.

"The first round of federal loan grants was one thing, and then the second one, their scrutiny was insane," said Tandy McMannes, Abengoa Solar's vice president of business development. "They said, 'Whatever we asked you for Solana, throw it out the door.'"

The reason was a glut of project applications combined with the stimulus deadline of Sept. 30, McMannes said.

"They were trying to keep only the strongest. They had too many people in the queue," he said. "They were given direct marching orders to make sure only the strongest and greatest got through this process."

Abengoa executives would not speculate on whether the increased scrutiny was due to doubts about Solyndra's finances. DOE itself is now under the magnifying glass for its approval of a $535 million loan guarantee for the now-defunct Solyndra.

DOE has been taking slightly longer to review applications since approving Solyndra, the first project to receive a loan guarantee under the agency's 1703 and 1705 loan programs aimed at clean energy technologies. The agency has given conditional or full guarantees to 36 projects since 2009, out of more than 400 applications total, according to an agency spokesman.

For the "due diligence" phase of the application, in which DOE verifies the applicant's financial soundness, the agency took 16 months for Solyndra and 18 months for Abengoa's Mojave project. Similarly, DOE took 22 months total for Abengoa's Solana project and 24 months for the Mojave project.

McMannes said the agency was extremely thorough with its Mojave application.

"It was an open book to them," he said of the project's finances. "They knew exactly the revenues we projected; we had to come up with a debt structure that fit very strongly within debt coverage ratios."

Abengoa's projects are a safe bet, McMannes said, because they use a technology known as concentrated solar power that has been around for 25 years. Power is generated by using mirrors to focus light on a tube of molten salt, which once heated up can power a turbine.

"It's unfortunate that the company went out of business," he said of Solyndra, which manufactured cylindrical photovoltaic panels. "I suspect the answer is Chinese products. On the photovoltaic side, the PV manufacturers outside China really can't compete."