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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The use of nonrenewable fuel sources has actually driven the world of the edge-- keep reading to learn why that is a really recent development.

Although this may sound odd, the sources of renewable energy that we would most likely recognise 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 sunshine. The first example of human beings utilizing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years back, when we captured it in our sails converted it into kinetic energy that might bring us across the seas, exploring the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A couple of centuries later, the first recognized examples of hydropower emerged, whereby rivers and streams powered waterwheels and other devices that might cut stone or grind grains. It was around the same time that we find the very first account of solar energy too; legend has it that a hero used a series of mirrors to burn an invading armada, focusing the power of the sun to develop directed heat energy, and similar devices were utilized to light torches or fires in great buildings.

Although lots of people would envision that we have been burning fossil fuels considering that the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy just really came about throughout the commercial transformation just over two hundred years back. Even the most state-of-the-art renewables are just as old. Around the time of the industrial revolution a 19-year-old French physicist produced the world's solar battery whilst exploring in his father's laboratory, converting sunshine into electrical energy. Today, solar is the cheapest electricity that humankind has 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 begins not in the twenty-first century, but numerous centuries previously.

One can quickly be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy merely need to have been the basis for all of mankind's production of power through our history. The Earth has been subjected to significant changes because of the amount of fossil fuels that have been burnt throughout human history. However, that is changing, and a new era 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 starting to emerge. Contrary to what one may think, this is not always a modern-day advancement; in fact, for more than 2 thousand years, we have actually collected the power of the components to develop energy, and the innovation for producing energy from solar is as ancient as the combustion engine; in almost all ways, it is a more natural mode of energy production than burning fossil fuels.