The press release from the companies didn’t put a price tag on the Sanya Skypump, but when UGE first introduced the concept last year the number reported was just a shade under $30,000. Federal renewable energy tax credits would presumably return 30 percent to the owner, and state and utility incentives might help as well. Still, it could be a tough sell in cases where solar is an option, given that solar is as low as $4/watt installed before incentives, and solar production and reliability are relatively predictable.

While this is the first packaged, wind-powered EV station product to come on the market, it’s not the first time wind has been used with an EV charging station. Last year, the U.K. company Ecotricity hooked one of its charging stations to a wind turbine next to the M4 motorway in Reading.

image via GE

More commonly, solar is the renewable energy of choice for renewable EV charging – as at Western Michigan University, where a 50-kilowatt solay array feeds 15 EV charging stations.

That system is hefty enough to almost always provide more than enough energy to charge multiple vehicles throughout the day: as of late yesterday afternoon, it had produced 35.5 megawatt-hours of electricity since it began operating in January, and electric vehicles had gobbled up 8.05 MWh of that power.

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