The key reasons why renewable energy sources are much more ancient than you think

The key reasons why renewable energy sources are much more ancient than you think

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Renewable energy is not some wonder of modern innovation, it is an ancient thing that assisted to develop human civilisation.

Although lots of people would imagine that we have actually been burning fossil fuels given that the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy only actually came about throughout the industrial transformation just over two centuries ago. Even the most state-of-the-art renewables are just as old. Around the time of the industrial transformation a 19-year-old French physicist created the world's solar battery whilst experimenting in his parent's laboratory, transforming sunlight into electrical energy. Today, solar is the most affordable electrical energy that humanity has actually ever produced, and people like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the forefront of utilizing both the ecological and economic benefits of renewable energy to continue writing this history, one that starts not in the twenty-first century, but lots of centuries before.

Although this may sound weird, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably identify today in fact date back over 4 thousand years. Wind is a significant cornerstone of numerous nations' plan to turn their energy grids green, especially in nations that don't have the blessing of year-round sunlight. The first example of people utilizing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years ago, when we captured it in our sails transformed it into kinetic energy that could bring us across the seas, checking out the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A couple of millennia later on, the very first known examples of hydropower emerged, where rivers and streams powered waterwheels and other contraptions that could cut stone or grind grains. It was around the exact same time that we discover the first account of solar energy also; legend has it that a hero utilized a series of mirrors to burn an attacking fleet, focusing the power of the sun to produce directed heat, and comparable devices were used to light torches or fires in fantastic structures.

One can quickly be forgiven for imaging that non-renewable energy just should have been the basis for all of mankind's production of power throughout our history. The Earth has gone through substantial modifications because of the amount of fossil fuels that have been burnt throughout human history. Nevertheless, that is altering, and a brand-new period of renewable energy, pushed 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 beginning to emerge. In contrast to what one might believe, this is not always a modern development; in fact, for more than two thousand years, we have actually collected the power of the elements to create energy, and the technology 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 nonrenewable fuel sources.