The use of nonrenewable fuel sources has driven the world of the edge-- keep reading to learn why that is a really recent development.
Although this may sound weird, the sources of renewable energy that we would most likely identify today really date back over four thousand years. Wind is a significant foundation of numerous countries' plan to turn their energy grids green, especially in nations that do not have the gift of year-round sunshine. The very first example of people 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 could carry us across the seas, checking out the world around us and trading with other civilisations. A number of millennia 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 produce directed heat energy, and comparable devices were used to light torches or fires in great structures.
One can easily be forgiven for imaging that non-renewable energy merely should have been the basis for all of humanity's production of power through our history. The Earth has actually gone through significant modifications because of the quantity of fossil fuels that have actually been burnt throughout human history. Nevertheless, that is changing, and a brand-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 collected the power of the aspects to create 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 fossil fuels.
Although many people would envision that we have been burning nonrenewable fuel sources because the start of civilisation, non-renewable sources of energy only actually came about throughout the industrial transformation just over two centuries 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 experimenting in his dad's laboratory, transforming sunlight into electrical energy. Today, solar is the most affordable electrical energy that humankind has actually ever produced, and people like the CEO of Ecotricity's institutional shareholders are at the forefront of utilizing both the environmental and economic benefits of renewable energy to continue composing this history, one that begins not in the twenty-first century, however many centuries in the past.