IEEE has bought into Solar Roadways...

[SeanB]

There are some nice solar studs around, saw them at the safety place Friday, and they are pretty nice, but never going to be a power source, just having enough power capture and storage to light some ultra high efficiency LED's during the night, and there they are fine.

There are others that are completely embedded in the road surface, with only a thick profiled glass top with integrated optical path visible, so that you have a white ( or orange for the median markers) light in one direction, with the other direction having a red light visible to the vehicles. They show low battery ( enough installed so that you can see those that are ageing) by changing to a flashing mode, though i would guess they do that in any case as night progresses, as I never travel this road after 11PM.

[PlainName]

Then think that on a perfect black body absorber ( what a tarred road is basically) that you get snowfall that does not melt until spring

Whilst we're allegedly thinking here, a small point of order: a road covered with white snow isn't going to be a perfect black body absorber...

Might also be worth considering that the road is the face to a BFO heatsink. And whilst you can get a temporary boost or dip in local temperature through solar heating, half the time that's not going to be happeing. And, if we think really hard, snow usually comes from clouds which tend to be not very transparent...

Picky, I know, but people in glass houses shouldn't' swing motes (or something). 

[SeanB]

Same argument also works for solar cells, and in any case the last time it snowed here where I live was in the last Ice Age. in any case solar cells will not be a stellar performer under snow, where you would want the solar power the most, so you do not have to throw those lumps of coal on the boiler to get the heat to make the electricity to melt the snow to make the shitty solar cells work a little.

A story from a civil engineer, who was building from plans supplied by the European Multinational Corporation, called for gutters 400mm by 400mm, all round. He queried this, and was told it was for snow loading. In the tropics, not too likely at all. But he built it as planned, because here we get frequent rainstorms that will drop 100mm of rain in an hour or two, so a large gutter and drain ( and the underground infrastructure to handle all that water as well) was not too unreasonable. Doubt that happens in a country surrounded all sides by high mountains.