Among Republican concerns about the Department of Energy's Solyndra loan guarantee was an early 2011 restructuring effort that allowed $75 million of new private investment to become the priority loan ahead of hundreds of millions of dollars already invested by the federal government.

That restructuring means that now any money salvaged from the bankruptcy proceedings of the solar energy company will be used to first pay off those private investors. Only after they get their cash would money go back to the government, which began providing funds for the company in 2009.

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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.

Several Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee have said that they are concerned that the restructuring deal was done in violation of the 2005 Energy Policy Act, which states that DOE's loan guarantees cannot be secondary to other financing.

Ahead of tomorrow's hearing on Solyndra, Republicans sent a letter today to Energy Secretary Steven Chu asking for all communication between the White House and DOE regarding the restructuring decision, which could end up costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.

But in an interview after this morning's House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on President Obama's green jobs agenda, DOE Deputy Secretary Daniel Poneman defended the restructuring decision.

"We had benefit of extensive legal review of that question; the statute is quite clear," said Poneman, whose office signed off on the restructuring. "When you are issuing a loan, you have to have priority, and we did."

But Poneman said that the 2005 law is also equally clear that the Energy secretary also has the responsibility to maximize interest of taxpayers when it comes to its loans.

"When you are in a restructuring situation, you have to have exactly this examination," Poneman said. "Will the taxpayer return be maximized by sustaining this thing? What's the higher return likelihood for the taxpayer? That's the analysis that was done."

Poneman said he and DOE's legal counsel are confident that the restructuring was "entirely legal, consistent with the letter and spirit of the statute."

But while DOE decided that it made financial sense to restructure Solyndra's loan in February to get investors to inject $75 million into the company, the new money did not turn the company around.

In August, Solyndra sought another restructuring deal in order to get private investors to pump even more money into the company.

This time, six months after its first restructuring analysis, DOE and its outside experts came to a different conclusion.

"The [August] assessment was that the taxpayers' best interests would not be served by going another turn of the wheel at that point," Poneman said.

DOE declined a second restructuring deal, and the company went into bankruptcy.

Of course, the first restructuring had already made the government the secondary creditor on the Solyndra loan.

Timing at issue

Republicans have questioned whether presidential politics was the reason DOE finally ended its relationship with Solyndra. While it was always going to be bad if Solyndra -- which had become a pet project of the White House -- failed, perhaps administration officials decided it was better that the company fail now rather than closer to the 2012 election.

As evidence, Republicans point to a January email this year between White House Office and Management and Budget staff regarding the Solyndra loan that states, "if Solyndra defaults down the road, the optics will arguably be worse later than they would be today."

But Poneman denied today that the "optics" played any role in DOE's decisions.

Those concerns were "never in any conversation I was a part of," Poneman said.

But even as Poneman was defending his agency's work on Solyndra at the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, top Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee were calling for greater scrutiny of how effective DOE has been in its efforts to support solar energy.

"We are writing to ask that the Committee expand its investigation of Solyndra and the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program to examine whether U.S. policies and incentives are adequate to ensure that U.S. manufacturers can compete effectively in the global solar market," ranking member Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Rep. Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) said today in a letter to panel Republicans.

"During the past month, three U.S. solar manufacturers have filed for bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the dominance of Chinese solar manufacturers is growing. The Committee needs to understand the forces behind these trends," the two Democrats wrote. "If we focus only on Solyndra, we will risk drawing incomplete and potentially misleading conclusions."