Chicago's Willis Tower To Become Vertical Solar Farm

An anonymous reader writes "The tallest building in the United States is set to become a soaring vertical solar farm, as Pythagoras Solar just launched a project to emblazon the building's glass façade with transparent photovoltaic panels. The new windows, dubbed high power density photovoltaic glass units, are a clever hybrid technology that lays a typical monocrystalline silicon solar cell horizontally between two layers of glass to form an individual tile. An internal plastic reflective prism directs angled sunlight onto the solar cells but allows diffuse daylight and horizontal light through. The high-profile project will begin on the south side of the 56th floor and could grow up to 2 MW in size — which is comparable to a 10-acre field of solar panels."

Comments

Re:Sears Tower

[Anonymous Coward]

Little known fact for our non-Chicagoan readers:

Willis Tower, formerly Sears Tower, was originally known as the John Hancock Tower

Re:Sears Tower

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The building is now and forever will be called the Sears Tower. No locals call it the Willis Tower. No non-locals should either. It's a landmark and a piece of architectural history. Like the headline says, it is "Chicago's." In this sense, it will always belong to the public, and the ability of some random foreign insurance firm to finagle some temporary naming rights will never change that.

So.. do Nerds pedantically correct people's statements for the sake of accuracy, or just for the sake of being different?

Re:Sears Tower

[Locke2005]

Funny, I feel the same way about Mount McKinley despite the fact it was renamed Mt. Denali in the Seventies.