After Tim Carney of the Washington Examiner claimed U.S. solar panel manufacturer First Solar “received a U.S. taxpayer loan guarantee to sell solar panels to itself,” the conservative blogosphere lit up and Fox News jumped on board. One problem: First Solar says that “no taxpayer money is involved” in the project Carney reported on.

Carney wrote that St. Clair Solar, a power plant subsidiary of Arizona-based First Solar, received a loan guarantee from the Export-Import Bank to purchase solar panels from First Solar's Ohio factory. Because the buyer was a subsidiary of the seller, Carney argues, First Solar wasn't really competing with foreign companies for the project so the Ex-Im Bank shouldn't have been involved.

But Carney is misunderstanding the project and getting some facts wrong. For one, the Ex-Im loan guarantee was not actually used for the project. First Solar spokesman Alan Bernheimer said he made this clear to Carney prior to publication.

Even if the loan guarantee had been used, and even if the project defaulted on the loan, taxpayers wouldn't have paid anything -- contrary to Carney's claim that “if the solar farm ever defaults, the taxpayers pick up the tab.” The Export-Import bank is a self-sustaining credit agency with a loan-loss reserve of around $4 billion, funded with the fees it collects from companies. Taxpayers are only on the hook if Ex-Im's reserve is depleted. That reserve is 18 times larger than the size of the authorized St. Clair loan guarantee. Ex-Im has a default rate of less than 2 percent and in the past five years, the bank has actually “earned $1.9 billion above the cost of operations for U.S. taxpayers,” according to Ex-Im spokeswoman Jamie Radice.

The fact that Carney repeatedly referred to the solar plant as a “wind farm” in the initial version of his column indicates that he's not very familiar with these high-tech energy companies and their projects. First Solar is in the business of building solar panels and plants, not operating them for the long-term. It's common practice for solar panel makers to package their product by engineering and building solar farms equipped with their panels, obtaining financing for the project, securing a deal with utilities to purchase the power, and then selling the whole enchilada to another company. That's what it did in this case.

The buyer was NextEra Energy Resources, and Ex-Im financing was presumably part of the negotiations, meaning it would have made First Solar and its made-in-Ohio panels more attractive relative to foreign companies. After agreeing to purchase the project, NextEra decided not to use the Ex-Im financing because “market circumstances changed,” according to Radice. Had the loan guarantee been used, NextEra -- not First Solar - would be the sponsor on the Ex-Im transaction. “Our support for this type of deal is entirely consistent with our mission as it allows US exporters to use a structure used by competing companies world wide,” Radice said.

Gary Hufbauer, a Senior Fellow at the fiscally conservative Peterson Institute commented that if First Solar had retained ownership of the solar farm, “then I would agree with raising the question” about the Ex-Im deal. But since it was designed to be sold, Hufbauer doesn't object, noting that U.S. solar panel makers are under heavy competition from Chinese firms. Hufbauer added, “Even for a coal fired power plant, it's fairly customary for a company to get it up and running and then turn it over.”

Carney also reported that First Solar received $15 million in loans from the Ohio government, but First Solar said they did not receive that assistance. The company posited that Carney was confusing First Solar with a different company.

Needless to say, if Carney didn't provide these facts, Fox News certainly didn't dig them up -- all the way down to “millions of dollars in federal loans, grants and guarantees to sell solar panels to wind farms,” as Brian Kilmeade said:

While conservative media singled out authorized support for First Solar as “another green energy blunder,” in Kilmeade's words, less than one percent of Ex-Im projects support renewable energy. From 2007 to 2011, the Ex-Im Bank supported 6,449 exporters; only 28 of those (or less than 1%) were involved in renewable energy. As you can see from this chart (based on a table by the Ex-Im Bank), Ex-Im's authorized support of about $720 million for renewable energy in 2011 was far less than the $4.8 billion it authorized to support for oil and gas:

That $721 million for renewable energy included the unused loan guarantee authorized for First Solar, and was significantly more than in previous years when Ex-Im failed to meet a 2008 Congressional mandate signed into law by George W. Bush to use at least 10 percent of its funding for “renewable energy and environmentally beneficial products and services”:

And while Townhall said that this is another “ridiculous stimulus-supported schem[e]” from Obama, and Human Events labelled it “Obamanomics,” an independent board -- not the White House -- determines the recipients of Ex-Im support.