Nexa's Sense of SnowFollow

Can't you just throw some boiled lobsters on the driveway?

Nah, The systems they have commercially add maybe $20 per month to the electrical bill during the winter, but i'd say thats worth it. you just have to raise it slightly above ambient.

The latent heat of fusion of water is about 334 Joules/gram. Assuming 7 inches of snow on a 3 meter by 4 meter driveway, that is about 18 cm x 300 cm x 400 cm = 2x10^6 cm^3 of ice, which has a density of about 1 g/cm^3, so about that many grams. At 334 joules per gram, that is: 7x10^8 joules of energy to melt it. One kilowatt-hour of electric energy costs me currently about US$0.16, and is literally 1000 Watts (1W=1J/s) times 3600 sec(one hour) = 3.6x10^6 Joules. It would cost US$31 to defrost that driveway in the hair blow drier fashion. And that is assuming every joule of energy goes directly into melting snow, none escapes to the air. You might be able to get close (maybe, say, a factor of two more) to that but certainly not with blow driers.

However, I just looked up the density of snow, and it is only 10% of the density of ice, so you can safely divide that figure by 10, so only about US$3.10 to remove 7 inches of snow. But that is just one day's worth (7 inches)! And it assumes 100% efficiency. Lastly, it neglects the energy required to take the thermal trip up from whatever temperature it started at to the melting point of ice, but this is likely vastly smaller unless you live in the arctic.