Cleaning Up After Blizzards With the Power of the Sun

During Boston's series of blizzards and snowstorms of the 2014-15 winter season, it was mind blowing seeing how challenging it was for businesses and municipal governments to deal with the shear volume of snow coming down.  The shear volume of snow mitigating approaches inspired one additional potential solution for dealing with snow fall.  

Around the world businesses are starting to add solar canopies to parking lots, providing cooling shade for cars, reduced thermal gain for the local environment (when compared to asphalt), and most importantly renewable energy that can be used at the source.  During the summer months these features are rather impressive, but what if we could add additional functionality for the winter months.  This blog has already done several pieces on adding heat pumps to photo-voltaic arrays as means of producing extra benefit from installed solar capacity, we are going to do that one more time with snow melting technology.  

Even in the dead of winter solar panels will be warmed by the sunlight striking their surface, making the solar panel warmer than the ambient environment.  This extra thermal energy has the potential to be used to melt fallen snow.  Using a network of heat pumps and piping engineers could readily produce a solar canopy system that concentrate thermal energy from location to location, working for maximum efficacy of the available energy.  Immediately after the snow has stopped falling the system would first work to start exposing the solar panels, this part would likely need at least some degree of human interference to initiate the process.  As the panels are wiped off the electrical and thermal energy are used to aid in cleaning more and more panels until the majority are exposed.  After the panels have been exposed, a human operator or autonomous control system would start designating regions where the systems thermal energy would cause the greatest benefit.  As the snow is melted it can be dumped into the local drainage infrastructure. 

While the overall labor benefits are moderate, the added functionality could be the deciding factor for facility operators making the decision as to adding solar parking lots.