Renewable energy is not some wonder of modern innovation, it is an ancient thing that assisted to construct human civilisation.
Although many individuals would picture that we have actually been burning nonrenewable fuel sources since the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy just really happened during the commercial revolution just over 2 hundred years earlier. Even the most high-tech renewables are just as old. Around the time of the commercial revolution a 19-year-old French physicist developed the world's photovoltaic cell whilst exploring in his father's lab, converting sunshine into electricity. Today, solar is the least expensive electricity that mankind has ever produced, and individuals like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the leading edge of harnessing both the ecological and economic benefits of renewable energy to continue composing this history, one that begins not in the 21st century, but numerous centuries in the past.
Although this may sound odd, 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 carry 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 invading fleet, focusing the power of the sun to produce directed heat, and similar contraptions were utilized to light torches or fires in excellent buildings.
One can easily be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy merely must have been the basis for all of humankind's production of power all throughout our history. The Earth has actually been subjected to considerable modifications because of the quantity of fossil fuels that have been burnt throughout human history. However, 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 starting to emerge. In contrast to what one might think, this is not necessarily a modern development; in fact, for more than 2 thousand years, we have harvested the power of the aspects to produce 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.