The story behind renewable energy companies these days

The story behind renewable energy companies these days

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Whilst combustion engines are only really a number of centuries old, people have been using renewable energy for over 4 thousand years.

Although this might sound odd, the sources of renewable energy that we would probably recognise today actually go back over 4 thousand years. Wind is a major cornerstone of many nations' strategy to turn their energy grids green, particularly in countries that do not 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 caught it in our sails transformed it into kinetic energy that might carry us across the seas, exploring the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A number of centuries later, the first recognized examples of hydropower sprang up, whereby 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 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 create directed heat energy, and comparable contraptions were used to light torches or fires in excellent buildings.

One can easily be excused for imaging that non-renewable energy just must have been the basis for all of mankind's production of power all throughout our history. The Earth has undergone considerable changes because of the quantity of nonrenewable fuel sources that have been burnt throughout human history. Nevertheless, that is changing, and a new age of renewable energy, pushed 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 might think, this is not always a contemporary development; in fact, for more than 2 millennia, we have actually gathered the power of the components to produce energy, and the technology for producing energy from solar is as old as the combustion engine; in almost all methods, it is a more natural mode of energy production than burning fossil fuels.

Although many individuals would think of that we have 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 modern 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 environmental 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.