How ancient are renewable energy examples exactly?

How ancient are renewable energy examples exactly?

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Many people probably assume that renewable energy is a really state-of-the-art thing-- keep checking out to discover why that is incorrect.

One can quickly be forgiven for imaging that non-renewable energy just need to have been the basis for all of humanity's production of power throughout our history. The Earth has actually undergone significant changes because of the quantity of nonrenewable fuel sources that have been burnt throughout human history. However, that is changing, 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 believe, this is not necessarily a modern development; in fact, for more than 2 thousand years, we have actually harvested the power of the elements 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.

Although lots of people would think of that we have actually been burning nonrenewable fuel sources since the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy only really came about during the commercial transformation just over 2 centuries earlier. 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 created the world's photovoltaic cell whilst experimenting in his father's laboratory, converting sunlight into electrical power. Today, solar is the least expensive electrical energy that mankind has actually ever produced, and individuals like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the forefront 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 many centuries before.

Although this may sound strange, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably recognise today actually go back over 4 thousand years. Wind is a significant foundation of lots of nations' strategy to turn their energy grids green, especially in nations that don't have the gift of year-round sunshine. The first example of humans harnessing the energy of the wind was around 4,000 years ago, when we captured it in our sails transformed it into kinetic energy that might bring us across the seas, checking out the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A number of millennia later, the first known examples of hydropower emerged, where rivers and streams powered waterwheels and other machines that might cut stone or grind grains. It was around the exact same time that we find the first account of solar energy as well; legend has it that a hero utilized a series of mirrors to burn an attacking armada, focusing the power of the sun to produce directed heat energy, and similar contraptions were utilized to light torches or fires in excellent structures.