I recall that some asian country (I can’t remember if it was Japan or China) used recycled glass to make solar road tiles that work like chain LEDs. These were porous enough to let water seep through, yet strong enough to handle several years of being a road surface. The practical upshots of this are myriad; The dark color aids in snow melt, the tiles are easy to replace, and cheap to produce, they can have other infrastructure wired to their reverse side, such as data fibre, or even battery packs to store excess charge and most importantly, when applied at scale they are both the the power generator and distribution network combined. There was even talk of making them piezoelectric, so that traffic driving over them would also generate useable current.