At 1451ft, Chicago's Willis Tower (née Sears) is the tallest building in the Western World
Our associates in Chicago informed us recently that some of the news out there in this cold, dark world these days is good and we felt we should share:
The Sears Tower, lately unceremoniously renamed the Willis tower, is about to pioneer a kind of crazy-innovative window, one that produces power without obstructing the view or letting in appreciably less sunlight.So please, Internet, I implore you to take a moment to block out the horrific situations in Japan, Libya, Egypt, Gaza, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf of Mexico, Wall Street, Detroit, Wisconsin, America, Mexico...etcetera, draw in a few good deep breaths, loosen the muscles in your neck, and soak-up a little ray of sunshine before you head back into the courtroom of public opinion and perjure yourself by saying the whole world has gone to shit because it hasn't.
At first the Willis tower will only replace windows on the south side of the 56th floor; eventually, the whole south face of the building could be slathered in glorious high tech energy generating windows, enough to generate 2 MW of power. The windows have the added benefit of keeping out the excess heat energy that plagues glass buildings.
As incredible as these windows sound, they're only a small part of a larger, $350 million initiative to reduce electricity consumption of the entire Willis tower by 80 percent.
(courtesy grist.org)
Only most of it has.
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