  We show that current cosmic acceleration can be explained by an almost
massless scalar field experiencing quantum fluctuations during primordial
inflation. Provided its mass does not exceed the Hubble parameter today, this
field has been frozen during the cosmological ages to start dominating the
universe only recently. By using supernovae data, completed with baryonic
acoustic oscillations from galaxy surveys and cosmic microwave background
anisotropies, we infer the energy scale of primordial inflation to be around a
few TeV, which implies a negligible tensor-to-scalar ratio of the primordial
fluctuations. Moreover, our model suggests that inflation lasted for an
extremely long period. Dark energy could therefore be a natural consequence of
cosmic inflation close to the electroweak energy scale.
