The first part of the park in Ayutthaya, some 70 kilometres (45 miles) north of Thailand’s capital, should be open by the end of July this year and it will produce one megawatt of energy, the Hamburg-based company said in a statement.

The park should be completed by the end of the year, with a total power output of three megawatts.

When fully operational, the park will produce 4,500 megawatt hours of electricity per year, equivalent to 2,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

However, the output is small compared to Germany, where the biggest solar park has a maximum output of 53 megawatts and can provide 15,000 families with electricity.

But the German company was not the one with “green” power news on Monday.

The Spanish renewable energy group Iberdrola Renovables announced it will build an offshore wind farm in the Baltic Sea off the German coast.

The company has bought the rights to the installation from a joint venture formed by Deutsche Erneuerbare Energien, a subsidiary of Deutsche Bank, and Germany’s Ventotec, it said in a statement. It did not reveal the price.

The wind farm will have 80 turbines for a total output capacity of 400 megawatts.

Iberdrola Renovables, a subsidiary of Spanish power group Iberdrola, said it expects to invest €9.0 billion ($12 billion) by 2012 in a programme of international expansion, notably in the United States, Britain and Spain.

Germany is the second largest producer of electricity from wind farms after the United States and ahead of China and Spain, according to a 2009 report by the Global Wind Energy Council.