CODY - Ask any Wyoming resident to describe the weather here, and you're bound to hear "windy" as a response.

In fact, the Equality State ranks seventh in the nation for its wind resources, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

The department also ranks the state as the nation's largest coal producer.

"We live in Wyoming, where coal is king. We generate at least half the nation's coal, for goodness sake," said Andy Rose, who uses wind energy to power his home between Cody and Powell.

Rose knows of no more than six other people in the state using wind power on a small, residential scale, and he struggles with this competition and the biases it presents.

Wind, however, is one of the cleanest and most sustainable means to generate electricity. It is also one of the oldest - used to power sailing ships, run European grain mills, and draw water from the dry prairies of America's West in the late 1800s.

"Wind energy is the fastest growing energy technology in the world, and the future looks bright for this clean energy source in Wyoming," said documents from FPL Energy, which owns and operates the Wyoming Wind Energy Center near Evanston. "The state has world-class wind resources, the technology is improving and the costs are coming down, making wind power cost competitive with other forms of electricity generation."

In addition to the Evanston project, which opened in 2003 and produces enough electricity to power about 43,000 homes, Wyoming has wind generation sites in Carbon County near Arlington, south of Cheyenne, and in Medicine Bow.

The state is estimated to have more than 14 million acres of windy land. Its electricity generation potential, according to EnergyAtlas.org, is around 883 million megawatt hours per year. To put that into perspective, in 1999 Wyoming's annual electricity consumption was 12 million megawatt hours.

The windiest months, as Rose has tracked them in his area, seem to be February, March and April.

"I'm not surprised to see that it's windiest in the spring," he said. "It's pretty windy in May and June, and October, November, too."