Why the November date matters

From 18 February 2027, three categories of battery will need a digital battery passport. These are LMT batteries, meaning batteries for light means of transport such as e-bikes and e-scooters, industrial batteries with a capacity above 2 kWh, and electric vehicle batteries. The legal basis is Article 77 of the Batteries Regulation (EU) 2023/1542. The battery passport is an electronic record created for each individual battery and accessed via a QR code on the battery itself.

The deadline has been fixed for a long time. For many companies, the open question is therefore no longer whether, but in what order the work gets done. Which data is already available internally, which has to come from suppliers, who keeps it up to date, and how does the code find its way into production? By mid-November, these are questions of project planning rather than strategy.

Our talk on implementing the battery passport

In the talk "Implementing the battery passport: regulation, reality, and what works", Dr Rainer Gerkens sets the requirements of the Regulation against what really takes time in implementation projects. That includes collecting data across several tiers of the supply chain and fitting the marking into existing manufacturing steps without rebuilding the line. On top of that, the passport is not finished once the battery has been placed on the market. Status changes and information from use have to be kept up to date throughout the battery's life, and when a battery is remanufactured or repurposed, a new passport is created that refers back to the original one.

The talk deliberately stays close to implementation. The Regulation sets out what information the passport has to contain. How a company gets there is largely left open, and that gap is where project experience comes in.

Deep Dive session on getting from plan to live passport

The Deep Dive sessions at Batteries Event are designed as in-depth discussion rounds. Dr Rainer Gerkens will moderate the session "What does it take to go from plan to live passport in three months?", bringing questions for the room rather than a second talk.

The focus is on where projects have stalled, which assumptions about system integration turned out to be wrong and which shortcuts led to rework later on. Participants tend to be at very different stages, and it is the exchange between companies already generating passports and those still planning that makes the format worthwhile.

The three months in the title are no coincidence. That is almost exactly the time between the event and the start of the obligation.