Having A Look At Renewable Energy Examples Throughout Human History And Just What They Mean Today.

[Bev Atilano]

The way in which we get our energy is terribly essential, in ways that go beyond the pragmatism of the environment crisis.

The following examples might not strike you initially as making use of a form of renewable energy, but they, by definition, actually are. The difference is that they, and their products, are paired with nature in such a way that electrical energy and combustion difffentiate us from in the modern world. We associate energy with human development because we make use of the natural world for it. Nevertheless, that might all change. As companies like Ecotricity's institutional investor and Octopus Energy's parent company continue to support the roll out of green energy technologies, we are going to begin to align our energy production with whatever else in the world. Plants (and all things that rely on them for food utilise solar energy, birds utilize wind power to raise their wings, fish usage hydro currents to propel them through the rivers and oceans. By returning to renewables, and it is a return, we are realigning ourselves with nature in such a way that we have not been ever since the industrial revolution, returning our mode of energy production to the world, not our distinction from it.

One may be forgiven for thinking that renewable energy is a totally modern phenomenon, and that non-renewable energy like coal and oil has actually been the basic mode of power production all throughout the entirety of human history. In fact, that's not quite really true. Companies like the activist investor in Energias de Portugal are by no means the first to use the power of the natural world, nor even enjoy the economic benefits of renewable energy; it is the most ancient form of energy and actual source of civilisation's development, from the fire used by our distant forefathers to the wind in the sails of trade. It may not be the form that we acknowledge it in today, but solar, wind, and hydro power all have histories that go back over two thousand years, and can assist us to comprehend exactly what it was that we lost when we stoked the fires of civilisation with fossil fuels hauled up from the depths.

For the huge majority of human history, our modes of generating energy have been seemingly renewable. When our cave-dwelling forefathers lit fires, it was using wood sustainably collected from the great forests that extended across the glove, but it remains in the civilisations of the ancient world that we actually began to use sources of renewable energy in an efficient and significant method. At first came the wind, when we established contraptions that could harness its energy and transform it into motion, permitting us to sail across oceans to check out and trade with new lands. After this came water, as its movement was utilized by waterwheels to cut stones and mill grain, a concept that we also applied to the wind by creating windmills. Finally came solar, the very first spark issued by a legendary figure who used a series of mirrors and glass to direct the sun's rays and burn an invading fleet. It was then developed into electrical power for the first time in the nineteenth century by a 19-year-old physicist.