DOE OSTI2018
There is an urgency to advancing wastewater technologies due to aging water infrastructure and emerging regulations. A crosscutting working group proposes a conceptual design for a test bed network to understand and evaluate wastewater technologies to drive acceptance and deployment of new technologies to enhance performance. The working group includes contributors from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Water Research Foundation (formerly known as the Water Environment & Reuse Foundation). Upgrading today's aging wastewater treatment infrastructure to a new generation of water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) requires the development and deployment of innovative technologies. The path to technology adoption depends on expensive, time consuming, and often repetitive cycles of testing and validation. Existing water resource recovery technology testing facilities (e.g., test beds) are underutilized and cannot, by themselves, broaden technology uptake. It has been proposed that technology adoption could be accelerated by a network linking these test facilities with innovators, manufacturers, utilities, regulators, policymakers, and educators. This document proposes a structure for a National Test bed Network (TBN) for water resource recovery. The concepts for its operation are explored herein. This document identifies drivers to launch a TBN and critical needs for successful implementation of the network. An important driver to technology implementation at WRRFs is the relationship between local utilities and state regulators. The TBN could provide access to validated performance data and facilitate deployment. To link the stakeholders and accelerate deployment, the TBN will require standards for methods, data quality, data management, and data security. These standards will enable validation of performance and will expand the “toolbox” that utilities and regulators could consider. Design, set up, and launch of this toolbox is beyond the scope of operations of utilities and regulators and will likely require external support to achieve full operation. Herein, a pathway is proposed to achieve this full operation. This document defines the function of a WRRF TBN. It also proposes a structure for the TBN to achieve its stated goals and mission. Finally, this document summarizes findings from several sources, including a series of workshops about the TBN concept, operators of test beds in ancillary industries, and discussions with regulators and permitting agencies. A description of this work was published in the peer-reviewed literature (Mihelcic 2017).
29 ENERGY PLANNING, POLICY, AND ECONOMY↗