To help the state's landowners understand Wyoming's wind energy industry and the part they might play in it, the Ruckelshaus Institute at the University of Wyoming recently released the second edition of its "Commercial Wind Energy Development in Wyoming" guide.

The guide notes that Wyoming's wind energy capacity grew from 288 megawatts in 2007 to 1,400 megawatts in 2010, representing an increase of nearly 500 percent.

In walking readers through the stages of a wind power development, the guide notes that the monetary value of a wind resource is not only determined by wind power density, speed and variability, but access to existing transmission technology, environmental concerns, local tax rates and other variables that landowners should consider when determining if their land is suitable for a wind project.

The guide explains laws such as the Wyoming Wind Energy Act of 2011, which defined requirements for wind energy agreements, and the Wind Energy Facilities Act of 2010, which set standards for the county-level wind permitting process.

In terms of impacts, the guide contains information on how to mitigate environmental impacts such as golden eagle deaths caused by turbines. It also includes statistics on positive economic impacts, saying four to eight jobs are created per 100 megawatts of installed capacity.

According to a recent Brookings Institution report, most of the 2.7 million green energy jobs in the United States are not in rural states like Wyoming but in the largest U.S. metro areas.