The Windy City will soon get windier if Chicago’s 110-story Sears Tower installs wind turbines on top of the Western Hemisphere’s tallest building. Solar panels and “green” roofs are also being considered. The aim is to cut the skyscraper’s energy use — equivalent to 9,000 SUVs a day — by 80 percent.

It’s all tentative. The only certainty seems to be that the former Sears, Roebuck headquarters (completed in 1974) has been bought by Willis Group Holdings Ltd., which will rename it the Willis Tower, bringing to mind Bruce Willis as a cop in Die Hard (1988), who outwits terrorists who take an L.A. skyscraper hostage.

The only hostages in the Willis Tower, we trust, will be top executives whose corner offices may be in the line of fire if a blade shoots off a wind turbine on one of the tower’s big shoulders.

Still, the idea of wind turbines atop a skyscraper, with sufficient safety built in, merits applause. “If we can take care of one building that size, it has a huge impact on society,” said the project’s architect, Adrian Smith.

That’s a tall if.

Mr. Smith, by the way, designed an early and thoroughly classical version of Providence Place mall in the early 1990s. The mall, completed in 1999 with another design, is about as long as the Sears Tower is tall. Of course, the mall surely uses far less than 9,000 SUVs’ worth of energy daily — and without windmills.