Abound Solar this week became the second government-backed solar power manufacturer, after Solyndra, to go belly up – but this one won’t cost the taxpayers nearly as much money.

Solyndra got a half-billion-dollar loan guarantee before failing and left the U.S. Department of Energy virtually nothing to recover. But Abound, a Colorado-based thin-film company, had used just $70 million of a $400 million guaranteed loan when the DOE halted disbursements, fearing for the company’s future after the Solyndra debacle.

image via Abound Solar

“Because of the strong protections we put in place for taxpayers, the Department has already protected more than 80 percent of the original loan amount,” the DOE’s chief spokesman, Damien LaVera, said in a post on the department’s blog. “Once the bankruptcy liquidation is complete, the Department expects the total loss to the taxpayer to be between 10 and 15 percent of the original loan amount.”

That’s still real money, of course, and Abound’s collapse gives Obama administration critics a little more ammunition in their attacks on the president’s clean energy policy.

“Abound is just the latest reminder that President Obama’s stimulus has failed,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) and Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee Chairman Cliff Stearns (R-Fla.) said in a statement. First Solyndra, then Beacon Power, Ener1, and now Abound – the bankruptcies are piling up, confirming the prophecy of President Obama who warned in his State of the Union address that ‘some companies fail.’ But the question remains — why invest in risky bets like Solyndra in the first place, especially when administration experts are warning that they are doomed for failure?”

Beacon Power, an energy storage company, went into bankruptcy last October, but the DOE appears on the way to recovering most of the $39 million in guaranteed loans the company actually took out – its assets were purchased for $30 million by Rockland Capital. Lithium-ion battery specialist Ener1, which took around $55 million in U.S. loans, is operating in bankruptcy.

Abound’s collapse comes as the solar manufacturing industry – in the United States and throughout the world – continues to lurch through a brutal reordering. One day after Abound announced it was closing, German company Schott Solar said it was closing a New Mexico plant and would stop producing crystalline silicon photovoltaic products at its main Germany plant this fall.

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