The history behind renewable energy companies these days

The history behind renewable energy companies these days

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Whilst combustion engines are just truly a couple of centuries old, human beings have actually been using renewable energy for over four thousand years.

Although lots of people would picture that we have actually been burning fossil fuels given that the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy just really happened during the commercial revolution just over 2 hundred years back. 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 most inexpensive 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 writing this history, one that begins not in the 21st century, but lots of centuries before.

Although this might sound weird, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably acknowledge today actually go back over 4 thousand years. Wind is a major foundation of many countries' strategy to turn their energy grids green, particularly in nations that do not have the gift of year-round sunlight. The very first example of humans utilizing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years earlier, when we caught it in our sails transformed it into kinetic energy that might carry us across the seas, checking out the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A number of millennia later on, the very first known examples of hydropower sprang up, where rivers and streams powered waterwheels and other contraptions that could cut stone or grind grains. It was around the very 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 develop directed heat, and similar devices were utilized to light torches or fires in great buildings.

One can quickly be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy simply should have been the basis for all of humankind's production of power through our history. The Earth has gone through substantial modifications because of the amount of fossil fuels that have actually been burnt throughout human history. Nevertheless, that is changing, and a new age of renewable energy, drove forward by individuals 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 believe, this is not always a modern-day development; in fact, for more than two millennia, we have actually collected the power of the components 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.