BERLIN, July 10, 2008 (AFP) - The US investment fund Blackstone plans to invest more than one billion euros (1.57 billion dollars) in a German offshore wind farm, a press report said on Thursday.

Germany wants to develop substantially offshore facilities because the country is running out of land for potential wind farms, the report in the Financial Times Deutschland said.

The government planned to develop 30 sites with a capacity of 25,000 megawatts in the Baltic and North seas by 2030, and had recently raised subsidies for wind-energy sources.

The report said that Blackstone intended to take stakes in the 'Meerwind' (Seawind) park planned near Helgoland island in the North Sea.

'Blackstone's decision will certainly pull other investors in its wake,' the newspaper quoted Ralf Bischof, director of the German wind energy federation as saying.

But the head of German power giant EON, Wulf Bernotat, on Thursday questioned the feasibility of the government's wind farm projects and said the policy direction may be well-intended but too idealistic.

'It is a good idea but the political hopes behind it are perhaps too high,' Bernotat told a press conference in Berlin.

He said building wind farms far offshore would prove expensive and that the technology for such projects was not yet in place.

'Who is going to build the wind farms? Where and how?' Bernotat asked.