Reasons why renewable energy sources are much more ancient than you think

Reasons why renewable energy sources are much more ancient than you think

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Whilst combustion engines are just actually a couple of centuries old, humans have actually been utilizing renewable energy for over four thousand years.

Although lots of people would picture that we have been burning fossil fuels because the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy only really came about during the industrial revolution just over 2 centuries earlier. Even the most state-of-the-art renewables are just as old. Around the time of the commercial transformation a 19-year-old French physicist developed the world's solar battery whilst exploring in his dad's laboratory, converting sunlight into electricity. Today, solar is the cheapest electrical energy that mankind has actually ever produced, and individuals like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the leading edge of harnessing both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy to continue writing this history, one that starts not in the 21st century, however numerous centuries before.

One can easily be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy merely should have been the basis for all of humanity's production of power throughout our history. The Earth has actually undergone considerable changes because of the amount of nonrenewable fuel sources that have actually been burnt throughout human history. Nevertheless, that is changing, and a new period of renewable energy, drove forward by people like the founder of the hedge fund with a stake in Energias de Portugal and the co-founder of Octopus Energy's parent company, is starting to emerge. In contrast to what one might think, this is not always a modern-day development; in fact, for more than two thousand years, we have actually harvested the power of the elements to develop energy, and the innovation for producing energy from solar power is as ancient as the combustion engine; in almost all methods, it is a more natural mode of energy production than burning fossil fuels.

Although this might sound odd, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably recognise today in fact date back over four thousand years. Wind is a significant cornerstone of many nations' plan to turn their energy grids green, particularly in nations that don't have the blessing of year-round sunlight. The first example of human beings utilizing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years ago, when we captured it in our sails converted it into kinetic energy that could bring us across the seas, exploring the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A number of millennia later, the very first known examples of hydropower emerged, whereby rivers and streams powered waterwheels and other contraptions that might cut stone or grind grains. It was around the same time that we discover the first account of solar energy too; legend has it that a hero utilized a series of mirrors to burn an invading armada, focusing the power of the sun to create directed heat, and similar devices were used to light torches or fires in great structures.