Helping Environmental Technologies get the Green Light

A new scheme to help innovative green technology companies get their products to market, will be showcased at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs today. Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) is a European Commission scheme which gives companies working in the water, waste and energy sectors the proof of verification they need to secure investment and market their products.

The ETV scheme aims to remove one of the biggest barriers to the uptake of green technologies: lack of confidence that they perform as they claim to. Under this system, businesses or entrepreneurs take their product to an ETV verification body of their choice, where its performance is assessed on criteria of their choosing, rather than official standards.

Jessica Cross Brown, a research analyst at NPL’s Centre for Carbon Measurement, which acts as a verification body for the scheme, explains: “Official standards cannot keep up with the rate of technological development of green products and often don’t reflect the concerns of the customer or investor. For example, some photovoltaic systems work better in overcast weather than direct sunlight. Because the standard for photovoltaics looks at performance in direct sunlight, this product would come away with a poor rating when actually it would perform much better when actually installed on someone’s roof. Not only does ETV allow companies to prove how their products perform when it matters, it also helps customers make informed decisions when purchasing a green product”.

Environment Minister Dan Rogerson said: “Green technologies are important for the environment while also providing a huge growth opportunity. The ETV scheme will help purchasers to identify British innovation and bring our green technologies to market sooner, benefitting both businesses and the environment.”

NPL’s Centre for Carbon Measurement is currently working with a company called Greengage Lighting Limited.  Branded as AgriLamp, they provide innovative energy efficient LED lighting solutions for agriculture. Agrilamp’s induction power ALIS light is designed especially for use in poultry and pig farms.

Azeez Ashiru, Technical Development Engineer at Agrilamp, said: “Chickens see light differently to humans and certain colours can cause the animals stress. We wanted to test ALIS but within a system that reflected these different requirements. Having our light ‘rubber stamped’ by NPL through the ETV scheme gives our customers around the world confidence that our product does what we say it does, and that it is safe and efficient.”

NPL’s Centre for Carbon Measurement is a verification body for energy technologies and will be joined today by other verification bodies in the UK including the Water Research Centre (WRc), the European Marine Energy Centre (EMEC) and BRE Global.

Businesses interested in registering for the scheme can read more here: http://iet.jrc.ec.europa.eu/etv/technology-proposers