Category 18 April 2019

Advance ETV - verification system

Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) aims to provide independent and reliable information with regard to environmental technologies performance claims. The ultimate goal of such a verification procedure is to provide confidence in the performance of a technology by supplying a sufficient verification quality which is both reasonable time and cost-effective.

In practice, ETV is carried out within a verification system which consists of four phases. This basic framework is roughly common to USA, Canada and EU projects (such as Advance ETV), even if several differences occur in the various procedures. The four steps are (i) the contact step, (ii) the development of the relevant parameters to be verified, (iii) the testing of the technology itself to provide data that can be checked against the parameters that have been defined and (iv) the verification of the product.

The first contact step can be initiated either by a technology provider or an institutional player for a specific technology area, as it has already been done in the USA by the government.

In the second step, the parameters to be verified with regard to the technology as well as the framework for the specific application and the technology are determined. In practice, the output consists of a protocol document which is often drafted by independent experts. In some cases, an already existing protocol might be directly applied or modified accordingly in order to be used.

The third step consists in testing the technology. The main output of this phase provides the necessary data that will be checked against the parameters and values that have already been determined in the second step. It is assumed that some tests can make use of already existing data, i.e. results coming from tests that have been achieved before the verification process, e.g. during the development of the product.

The fourth step deals with the verification, i.e. the comparison of the results of the test and the protocol. Two options are possible. First, a pass or fail can be stated towards target values that must be attained. The second option consists in providing the results for every parameter and leaving the reader to assess them himself.

Moreover, the financing aspect of verification has been investigated in ETV European projects. According to various case studies, the cost for producing a verification statement ranges from 10 000 € to 100 000 € but is often below 50 000 €. These costs might include the definition of a new protocol or the testing that might be required for producing data of sufficient quality. The workload for producing a verification statement varies, according to the case studies, from 140 to 412 hours.  However, both costs and workload will strongly depend on the complexity of the technology to be verified.

Source:
Advance ETV Deliverable 1.1 report