Clean energy provision and usage has a long history from an engineering perspective. This perspective can help understanding past and current developments at a time of increasing concern about climate change. Over many hundreds of years human beings have been extracting energy from their environment in various ways, many of which could also be acceptable in the future for achieving a lower energy carbon footprint.


This book for engineers, researchers and scientists in the renewable energy industries as well as for advanced students, investors, managers, and engineering historians, describes the engineering history of human methods for extracting energy from our environment, up to and including the electrical age.


Chapters cover the ancient and historical past, fuels between 1800 and 1900, science, engineering and electricity in the modern age, current energy vectors, clean and renewable energy, and an outlook to the future.


The book places those aspects and developments in context alongside present usage. It presents energy data in graphical or schematic ways to indicate these changes in different world regions, putting them in historical context. The goal is an understanding of the range of energy resources available to us from our environment.