We have utilised the power of nature for millennia, and we're finally starting to do so again.
The following examples may not strike you initially as using a kind of renewable energy, but they, by definition, are. The difference is that they, and their product, are combined with nature in such a way that electrical energy and combustion separate us from in the modern world. We associate energy with human production because we make use of nature for it. However, that could all alter. As companies like Ecotricity's institutional investor and Octopus Energy's parent company continue to support the production of green energy innovations, we are going to start to align our energy production with everything else on the planet. Plants (and everything that depend on them for food use solar energy, birds use wind power to lift their wings, fish use hydro currents to propel them through the rivers and oceans. By going back to renewables, and it is a return, we are realigning ourselves with nature in a way that we have not been since the industrial revolution, returning our mode of energy production to the planet, not our distinction from it.
For the vast majority of human history, our methods of producing energy have actually been ostensibly sustainable. When our cave-dwelling forefathers lit fires, it was using wood sustainably collected from the great forests that stretched throughout the glove, but it remains in the civilisations of the ancient world that we truly began to utilise sources of renewable energy in an effective and significant way. At first came the wind, when we set up gizmos that might harness its energy and transform it into motion, permitting us to cruise across oceans to check out and trade with colonies. Then came water, as its motion was used by waterwheels to cut stones and mill grain, a principle that we likewise applied to the wind by developing windmills. Lastly came solar, the first spark released by a legendary figure who used a series of mirrors and glass to direct the sun's rays and burn an attacking fleet. It was then developed into electrical power for the first time in the nineteenth century by a 19-year-old scientist.
One may be forgiven for believing that renewable energy is an entirely contemporary phenomenon, which non-renewable energy like coal and oil has actually been the standard mode of power production throughout the entirety of human history. In actual fact, that's not quite really true. Companies like the activist investor in Energias de Portugal are by no means the first to utilise the power of the natural world, nor even take pleasure in the economic benefits of renewable energy; it is the most ancient type of energy and very source of civilisation's advancement, from the fire utilized by our far-off ancestors to the wind in the sails of trade. It might not be the type that we identify it in today, however solar, wind, and hydro power all have histories that date back over two thousand years, and can help us to understand exactly what it was that we actually lost when we stoked the fires of civilisation with nonrenewable fuel sources hauled up from the depths.