Energy Secretary Steven Chu said today that he will be "very surprised" if the Energy Department's loan guarantee program loses as much taxpayer money as a recent White House-commissioned audit predicted.

Congress authorized the program to lose as much as $10 billion, and DOE predicted when it made the loan guarantees that it would lose about $5 billion. The program is now on track to lose about $3 billion, according to the report last week by Herb Allison, a former Treasury Department official who oversaw loans made to banks under the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

Chu said that DOE will take lessons from Allison's recommendations but that the agency has already started a "risk committee" to decide if a company is going the direction of the failed solar panel maker Solyndra LLC, which received a $535 million guarantee in 2009.

"I don't think we're going to lose $3 billion, for a very simple reason," Chu told reporters this afternoon after he testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on DOE's proposed fiscal 2013 budget.

"If it looks as though there's a rapidly changing ecosystem or if a company doesn't meet a milestone repeatedly, we're going to have to look at that and ... trade off whether we're going to continue to disburse money, or whether we're going to say, 'I'm sorry, it doesn't look like the likelihood of payback is going to be there.'"

Critics of President Obama's spending on clean energy technology seized on DOE's loan guarantee program after the bankruptcy of Solyndra last year, claiming that the administration lost taxpayer money by taking needless risks.

House Energy and Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and his deputy on the oversight subcommittee, Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.), continue looking for evidence of wrongdoing. They plan to hold a meeting tomorrow to authorize subpoenas for five White House staffers to testify on their role in approving the Solyndra loan (E&ENews PM, Feb. 15).

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the top Republican on the energy panel, has pressed Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) to host Chu for questioning on the loan guarantee program and Allison's report. The chairman said today that he has agreed to schedule a hearing as soon as the week of Feb. 27, and Chu said he is willing to testify.

"Even if a company does meet all its milestones and yet the whole ecosystem goes topsy-turvy, as what happened with solar, that's another thing that we need to be very conscious of," Chu said.