What if your backpack supported a tiny, collapsable wind turbine, charging your phone while you hiked? Could mushrooms be grown and dried in the shape of houses, putting roofs over heads without felling trees? Might we extract geothermal power from pools of water at the bottom of abandoned mine shafts?

These are some of the quirky notions bouncing around the Applied Energy Research Lab of the Nova Scotia Community College (NSCC), where a team of researchers and students directs its brainpower to the climate crisis. Governments and businesses bring their ideas and money, and the lab does the math, runs the experiment, or builds the prototype — in so doing, advancing technologies which cut carbon emissions in the province.

“When the push to make our electrical grid renewable started (between 2009 and 2011), it was about 80 per cent coal,” said Wayne Groszko, research scientist with the Applied Energy Research Lab. “We’re probably around 40 per cent coal today, which tells you there’s been a lot of progress. But the hardest part has yet to be done.”

The handy thing about coal is that it can be burned to produce power right when you need it. Renewables, like wind and solar, are cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient, but their output changes due to weather and time of day. Installing enough wind and solar to displace our remaining coal isn’t the problem. The problem is storing renewable power during overproduction, and deploying it during underproduction. In Nova Scotia, said Groszko, existing wind turbines already can, at times, produce more power than the grid can use.

“It’s not that there’s a scarcity of renewable energy anymore,” said Groszko. “It’s that there’s a surplus at certain times.”

Cracking this nut — of storage and deployment — would mean getting more renewables on the grid, and several of the technologies the Applied Energy Research Lab has been toying with address exactly this issue. One of the most promising, says Groszko, might be your water heater.

If equipped with a controller, this simple household appliance could be turned on and off at the whim of Nova Scotia Power, allowing the utility to store excess renewable power as hot water precisely when that power’s being generated, and because most tanks hold 40-60 gallons, the customer would never notice the difference.

“One water heater is insignificant,” said Groszko, “but there are easily 160,000 in Nova Scotia.”

He envisions a program in which the provincial government pays to upgrade existing water heaters with controllers, participating customers receive a credit on their monthly electricity bill, and Nova Scotia Power gets a place to store excess power, available for deployment (showers, etc.) as needed.

This is how a “smart grid” works, and water heaters are just the start. Two companies —Neothermal Energy in Nova Scotia, and Stash Energy in New Brunswick — are augmenting heat pumps with sodium acetate trihydrate, the same material used in handwarmers. It allows heatpumps to “store” hours worth of space heating, which means they, too, could become a reservoir of excess renewable power for later deployment.

Then there are EVs. Electric passenger vehicles support lithium-ion batteries of 60-90 kilowatt hours each, enough to power a house (with some rationing) for three days. These are tempting places to dump excess power, but the Applied Energy Research Lab has also been experimenting with “bidirectional” EV chargers. These allow power to flow both ways, such that grids can charge EVs, and EVs can charge grids. This turns all EVs, whether car, truck, school bus, or lobster boat, into a province-wide renewable energy storage system.

“These technologies certainly work,” says Groszko. “And they’re practical now, at least some of them. But it’s actually really hard to beat a very old solution to this problem, and that’s pumped hydro.”

Essentially a hydroelectric dam in reverse, pumped hydro is where excess power is used to pump water from a downhill reservoir to an uphill one. When the grid needs that power back, water is sent back downhill, running a hydroelectric generator. Pumped hydro facilities can be thought of as giant batteries, with the first being built in the late 1800s, and the largest in the 1980s. They can store power at scale, and last for centuries.

“A network of mid-sized pumped hydro facilities could probably meet all our storage needs in Nova Scotia,” says Groszko, who points to the Cape Breton Highlands and Cobequid Mountains as promising places to build, provided there’s a thorough regulatory framework, environmental assessment process, and public “social license.”

“Wind and solar are on their way now,” he says. “The question is no longer how we’re going to affordably make enough wind and solar power. That’s happening. The question is, how are we going to use it all? I think Nova Scotia’s up for this.”

The Climate Story Network is an initiative of Climate Focus, a non-profit organization dedicated to covering stories about community-driven climate solutions.