Does that mean that in high intensity regions you'd need active cooling or is that not a problem?
Usually cheaper to just put more panels tho. Pretty handy if you need to get the most out of roof space but otherwise more panels + heat pump water heater is much simpler solution.
> The front side of the PVT heat pump panel is similar to a solar panel and has solar cells to generate electricity. The backside is a heat exchanger that supplies the energy source for the heat pump. The heat exchanger-collector collects energy form the ambient temperature and additionally from daylight and sunlight.
Not sure how it does throughout the whole season.
I've seen a DIY system where the panels are boxed in, and the hot air created behind the panels used for blown air / heat recovery heating.
I'm aware of several large-scale solar situated in hot regions with no active cooling, so I guess my answer to your question is no, high effeciency panels in hot environments do not need active cooling.
Roof tiles are a different question. There's no airflow underneath them. So they probably get hot. Hot enough to matter? That's hard to say. Do they have the same thermal properties as a regular tile? What is the impact on building temperature? These would be factors to consider during construction. More insulation, better airflow, and do on.
Incidentally since they are not flat (at least not in the picture) that likely accounts for the lower effeciency).
This is a myth with little bearing to reality. Protons (and the atomic nucleus) are insignificantly tiny when compared to the size of an atom. The major contributor to electrical resistance are defects to the crytal lattice of metals and grain boundaries.
No. However, most of the time you want doped semiconductors and doing that introduces defects. The defects are bad for resistive losses but that's life.
> every computer works better cold
No. Conventional electronics based on doped semiconductors don't work below a certain temperature because the impurities are "frozen". There is a sweet spot of temperatures that works best. The purpose of cooling on a computer is to keep the temperature as close to the sweet spot as possible.
> Isn't that why Google's quantum computer is supercooled?
Quantum computers like Google's rely on superconducting materials (most of) those require sub-Kelvin temperatures to work, both to reach the superconducting regime and to reduce phonon induced decoherence. Superconductivity works in quite a different way to conventional materials to conductivity in semiconductors and metals too.