MADRID - Wind parks in Spain, a world leader in the renewable energy source, are increasingly being disconnected due to a fall in power demand caused by the economic slowdown, a report said Monday.

"Due to the fall in demand, it has become necessary to disconnect the wind parks which already produce more electricity than the system can absorb," business daily Expansion reported without citing sources.

The wind parks are usually disconnected at night when demand for power falls, it added.

Wind parks, a clean energy source, are the first power generators to be disconnected when demand for electricity falls because it takes them longer to stop production than other sources like nuclear plants, it said.

Spain's wind parks currently have an installed capacity of nearly 17,000 Megawatts out of a total capacity of 95,000 Megawatts and account for about 15 percent of Spain's power needs on average.

Last month, electricity consumption in Spain fell 13.4 percent over the same time last year as car plants and other factories, which are major power consumers, drastically reduced demand.

With new wind parks scheduled to open and Spain's recession expected to continue, the problem will only worsen in the medium term, Expansion said.

Spain's installed wind park capacity is expected to rise to 20,000 megawatts in 2010.

Spain, along with Germany and Denmark, is among the three biggest producers of wind power in the European Union.

The Spanish economy, the fifth largest in Europe, entered recession at the end of 2008 as the global financial crisis hit an already weakened building sector, which had been the country's engine of growth for over a decade.