Very interesting. I live in a place where we have significant issues with ice build up on roof surfaces, gutters, etc. One way to deal with this is to electrically heat the roof and gutters. This of course is expensive (very!). So I had the ideal that one could use the available solar energy (it is reasonably sunny in winter here) to melt the ice. My idea is not to use PV panels and restive electrical heating but to directly transfer the solar energy as heat to the ice. This would be done with some sort of heating panel, coupled to the metalic gutters with a heat pipe. Sometime I need to do some analysis to see if it is a viable idea. How to ensure snow does not cover the panel/solar heat collector is also a potential problem.