The story behind renewable energy companies today

The story behind renewable energy companies today

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Whilst combustion engines are only really a number of centuries old, human beings have actually been using renewable energy for over four thousand years.

Although many individuals would imagine that we have been burning fossil fuels since the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy only really came about during the industrial transformation 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 parent's lab, transforming sunshine into electrical power. Today, solar is the least expensive electrical power that humankind has actually ever produced, and individuals like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the leading edge of utilizing both the ecological and economic benefits of renewable energy to continue composing this history, one that starts not in the 21st century, but many centuries before.

One can easily be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy merely should have been the basis for all of humankind's production of power all throughout our history. The Earth has undergone substantial modifications because of the amount of fossil fuels that have been burnt throughout human history. However, that is altering, and a brand-new age 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. Contrary to what one might believe, this is not necessarily a modern advancement; in fact, for more than 2 thousand years, we have harvested the power of the elements to develop energy, and the innovation for producing energy from solar power is as old as the combustion engine; in almost all methods, it is a more natural mode of energy production than burning nonrenewable fuel sources.

Although this may sound strange, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably acknowledge today actually go back over 4 thousand years. Wind is a major foundation of numerous countries' strategy to turn their energy grids green, especially in countries that don't have the blessing of year-round sunshine. The first example of humans utilizing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years back, when we caught 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 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 exact same time that we find the very first account of solar energy also; legend has it that a hero used a series of mirrors to burn an attacking armada, focusing the power of the sun to produce directed heat energy, and comparable contraptions were utilized to light torches or fires in terrific buildings.