Apartments wouldn't generate quite 100% of the energy needs using current cells but it could well be pretty close,
What makes you able to make that claim? In moderately large buildings, it just doesn't compute at all for the time being (unless as I said we put solar panels elsewhere than on top of roofs, but I think this has already been tried and it's not that great). Of course I don't know about the future, but we'd need a major breakthrough in solar panels tech to be able to achieve this.
not counting cars and as the efficieny further improves the day when it could produce all the apartments needs is not far off. OTH, you don't own the apartment so the people that do would charge you as the utility would -- so what! Office buildings wouldn't generate all there needs either and energy dense needs like commercial aircraft are not going solar any day soon -- again, so what
I didn't understand. What do you mean by "not couting cars" and why? If electric cars become the norm, they will become an integral part of people power consumption. Maybe even the greater part.
Then the future improvements - there's nothing to say about that as of yet. That will probably happen, but it's future. We just don't know.
OTH, you don't own the apartment so the people that do would charge you as the utility would -- so what!
Not sure I got this one either. What does owning have anything to do with it?
And in many countries where most people live in apartments (there are many of those, comes as a shock to people from the US), there are many people owning their apartments. It makes no difference. And even when they just rent it, they usually pay for their own electricity consumption directly - not the landlords!
And if it's the landlords in some countries (dunno) - what difference does that make? We're not talking about who pays here, but how much energy we can produce.
Office buildings wouldn't generate all there needs either and energy dense needs like commercial aircraft are not going solar any day soon -- again, so what
The fact that a given technology allows only the production of a small fraction of the overall needs is the key point IMO, and explains why said technology doesn't take off. It's often just a matter of numbers.
And the apartment buildings is just an example here. The whole issue is the global vs. individual approaches. Global approaches are usually favored not just because they concentrate money and power, but also because they are just more cost-effective in many cases as someone else said.
I'm personally all for individual approaches, but I realize they will fulfill the energy needs of only a very small fraction of all needs.
As for solar panels, at this point, and again unless there is a major breakthrough - or we take a different approach to harvest solar energy - it's not going to work well as a global approach. It is for individual/very local needs.
As many other people, your reasoning seems to be that global and individual approaches don't have to compete - they can be complementary. And I agree with this in theory.
In practice though, it just "fragments" the overall generation of electricity, making things much more complex to handle on a large scale, usually costs a lot more overall to deploy, and the benefits, again not as an individual, but on a large scale, could be reaped probably only after decades. At which point the used technology would probably fail and need to be replaced, generating more costs and waste. So that's definitely not a simple problem.