The ways renewable energy sources have actually been utilized throughout history.

[Desrosier Natashia]

Harnessing the power of the weather is by no means a modern development, it extends back at least 4,000 years, if not to the dawn of humanity.

Renewables are undoubtedly humanity's future, however it can be surprising to find that it's also our past. Due to the growing existential risk of the climate crisis, renewable electricity is the face of our salvation, guaranteed to ease us of our fatal reliance on non-renewable energy forever more. However, renewables have actually been with us long before the founder of the hedge fund with a stake in Energias de Portugal was born, and even before we started excavating coal out of the ground. In fact, there's an assertion to be made that renewables preceded civilisation itself with the eco- friendly harvesting of timber for fire at the very dawn of humanity's scientific development. Naturally, lumber probably does not count as a renewable energy in a world populated by almost 8 billion people, so we'll need to wait a few hundred thousand years for the beginning of renewables as we would recognise them today.

As civilisations started to emerge throughout the world, so too did our first circumstances of harnessing the power of the natural elements to create energy; the sail. As early civilisations set off across the seas to encounter and buy and sell with their peers, they harnessed the renewable power of the wind to create the energy required for movement about 4,000 years earlier. 2 thousand years later marked the very first recognized use of hydropower when the civilisations of the Mediterranean basin used the waterwheel to cut and crush products with amazing force. Around a comparable time, legend has it that solar energy was used for the first time by a semi-mythical figure who set fire to an invading armada utilizing a series of mirrors and glass things that focused and directed the extraordinary power of the sun with terrible results.

Throughout the following centuries, the use of renewables expanded gradually but surely. The waterwheel became an essential of mills and boats, whilst the windmill harnessed the strength of the wind to squash and grind grains or hops throughout Europe. It was not up until the 19th century that a 19-year-old physicist set the stage for renewable energy companies of today by producing electrical energy from the sun's rays for the first time in history. He was followed by pioneers across all the elements, developing the point that people like the co-founder of Octopus Energy's parent company and the CEO of the firm that backs Ecotricity are now in a position to supply the least expensive electrical power that humanity has actually ever created from sunlight. Renewables certainly are our future, however it deserves keeping in mind that coal and other filthy energy have played but a tiny portion of our energy history.