People in apartment buildings or renters can also save money with solar. Many power companies have large solar arrays that give participating customers credit on their bill from the cheaper electricity. Landowners also benefit, especially when these solar farms are placed on agricultural land, known as agrivoltaics, allowing certain crops to use less water and farm animals to cool themselves in their shade.

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Myth #3 Wind power inevitably kills wildlife.

With hundreds of thousands of turbines in operation, wind power now makes up eight percent of the world’s energy. But alongside these sprouting modern windmills has come stories of birds, whales, and even insects and bats killed or injured in their presence.

In some cases, wind energy can cause a small fraction of wildlife deaths, but they “pale in comparison to what climate change is doing to [the animals’] habitat,” says Douglas Nowacek, a conservation technology expert at Duke University. “If we’re going to slow down these negative changes, we have to go to renewable energy.”

When it comes to whales or other marine mammals, “we have no evidence—zero” that any offshore wind development has killed them, says Nowacek, who studies this as lead researcher in the school’s Wildlife and Offshore Wind program. (Most die instead from ship strikes and deadly entanglements in commercial fishing gear.) 

Noise produced when heavy columns are driven into the ground during construction may temporarily disturb whales in the area, but the intrusion is so minor “one whale we tagged didn’t go anywhere when the pounding started,” he says. Blasting for offshore oil is much more disruptive, and oil spills extensively damage marine life, he says.