Because Chicago is home to approximately 80 wind companies, including corporate headquarters and turbine factories, the city is seen as a hub for the wind industry. With plenty of farmland suited to wind turbines, Illinois has a law mandating that the state gets at least 18 percent of its electricity from wind by 2025. Unfortunately, the state agency that decides the source of all of Illinois’ wind power has halted development of new wind farms and could hamper the state’s ability to use this resource for years to come. The culprit is the Illinois Power Agency, which so far has not provided the necessary guarantees to facilitate new wind farm construction. The rub is that the agency is compelled to buy electricity from the lowest-cost source to satisfy the wind-power mandate.
Unless the governor, the Illinois Commerce Commission or the state legislature acts to change the state’s renewable-energy process, few or no long-term contracts to build new wind farms will be granted. In that scenario, the state will have to fulfill its renewable-energy requirement by purchasing credits from wind farms in other states such as Texas. Created in 2007 to assure that ComEd and Ameren give customers the best possible deal, the Illinois Power Agency dictates where the utilities purchase their electricity. Because the agency’s duty is to buy the cheapest electricity possible, it purchases wind power on the spot market or through short-term contracts.
Despite the Illinois Power Agency’s convoluted rules, the state is out-performing many others in terms of wind power. The American Wind Energy Agency ranks Illinois 7th nationwide in installed wind capacity in 2009, and 14th for wind potential. Howard Learner, an environmental law professor at Northwestern University, believes this is a make or break moment for the future of wind power in Illinois. “There’s been recognition by everyone involved in the need for long-term contracts for new wind farms to support jobs in the state and also reduce pollution here,” Learner said.
High-end residential sales in Chicago rose – somewhat unexpectedly — during the first eight months of 2010. 
The opening of the new Modern Wing of the 
horizontal, a symmetrical glass and limestone box that sinks into the earth, Calatrava’s is an expressionist sculpture that ascends and twists into the lakefront air. The signature Calatrava move (similar to his El Alamillo Bridge in Seville) is the pair of beautifully articulated wings that frame the new building, called the Burke Brise Soleil. With a wingspan rivaling a Boeing 747 and weighing 90 tons, they open and close with the museum (and also with the ebb and flow of the wind load). But Calatrava’s greatness is that his wings aren’t merely wings — they are part of a vocabulary of organic shapes that converse with Lake Michigan, echoing waves and stingrays and even skeletal shapes. “The project responds to the culture of the lake: sailboats, the weather, culture, the sense of motion and change,” he said.
For all the splendor of the wings, the arrival on the inside may be the architect’s greatest reach — the Cathedral-like entry, the Windhover Hall, that recalls everything from Gothic to Antoni Gaudi’s unfinished Sagrada Familia in Barcelona — complete with flying buttresses, vaulted ceilings and a nave shaped like a prow that extends into Lake Michigan. Like Piano, Calatrava is reaching back to the scared origins of art and expression to create a building that cloaks its exhibits in silence and suggestions of ancient ritual.