Seasonality and the 2010 Feed-in Tariff (FiT) degression result in a sequential Photovoltaic (PV) installation drop.
January 2010 PV installations were up over 80 times year over year from the depths of the financial crisis.

Once again, not long after my tweet:

Where is the January und February 2010 #PV registration data the German Bundesnetzagentur promised by the end of April 2010? #Solar 9:01 PM May 4th via TweetDeck

The Bundesnetzagentur (German Federal Network Agency) released preliminary EEG related PV system registration data for January 2010 last Friday. As I noted in German 2009 Photovoltaic installs exceed 3.8 GigaWatts!, the agency had said the January and February 2010 preliminary PV registration data would be released in April. Perhaps the agency was checking the registrations twice, but the data was released just after the German Bundestag voted to approve a mid year revision of the PV FiT included in the Renewable Energy Act (EEG).

First, the December 2009 registrations included with the new data on a rolling basis is unchanged. PHOTON Consulting has anticipated upward revisions but these have not yet appeared. Also, a quick January 2010 data check showed less than a quarter of the total MegaWatt registrations were made in the first seven (7) days of the New Year.

German PV installations of 224.8 MW (MegaWatt) in January 2010 were down from the record 1.4609 GW (GigaWatt) exuberance of December 2009 yet were eighty (80) times the 2.8 MW installed in January 2009. Likewise, registrations were down to 7282 from 42188 in December though up over twenty-two (22) times from the 321 of January 2009. The robust January installations during the brutal German winter are quite remarkable given the cold and snowy conditions prevalent in most regions.

January 2010 Registration Data
As shown in the table below, the capacity mix shifted back towards PV systems sized 500 kW (kiloWatt) and smaller representing 81.8% of the January 2010 installs versus 69.6% in December 2009. The largest PV system installed was 3.36 MW in Fuldatal, Hessen, a few kilometers from the SMA Solar Technology AG headquarters.

The 10 kW to 100 kW segment lead again with 4116 or 56.5% of registrations and 118.4 MW or 52.7% of capacity additions versus 668.8 MW or 45.8% of December 2009 installed capacity. PV systems sized 10 kW and smaller moved ahead of the 500 kW to 1 MW segment with 18.02 MW installed and 2889 or 39.7% of registrations.

The German Federal Network Agency has lowered expectations and claims the preliminary evaluation of the February 2010 registration data will be provided soon.

I tracked down and took photos of the December 2009 7.56 kW PV system install in Schwarzenbach a. Wald when I visited my uncle before the PHOTON Technology Show in Stuttgart. However, in a rare case of operator error, I deleted the photos from the internal memory of my Panasonic LUMIX DMC-ZS3 by accident. Argh!

Will the Greens party (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen) gains in the North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) election lead to changes in the PV FiT revisions?