DIN and DKE publish guidance for firms to meet mandatory EU Battery Passport rules

The German Institute for Standardization (DIN) and the German Commission for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies (DKE) have jointly published a guidance standard to help companies meet the requirements for the digital battery passport, which the EU is making mandatory from February this year.

The EU Battery Pass is a digital certificate system that enables consumers to verify the sustainability and environmental credentials of batteries used in electric vehicles (EVs) and other applications. It provides a document of data along a battery’s entire lifecycle. The DIN DKE SPEC 99100 – Requirements for Data Attributes of the Battery Passport – defines the data attributes that need to be included in the passport based on both requirements by the EU Battery Regulation, as well as voluntary additions.

According to DIN and DKE information can include general information about the battery and manufacturer, the battery materials used and their composition, as well as performance and durability. Information on ethics and sustainability can also include working conditions for miners involved in raw material extraction and a battery carbon footprint. At battery EV production increases, carmakers and suppliers are looking at supplier mapping and the sourcing, mining and processing of the critical minerals used in the lithium-ion batteries, which can have significant environmental and social impacts.

DKE SPEC 99100 builds on the Content Guidance for the EU Battery Passport from the Battery Pass Consortium, which was last update in December 2023. The Battery Pass Consortium is made up of 11 partners including carmakers, tier suppliers, alongside research institutions and providers of digital services (see box).

“The content guidance laid the foundation for a practical explanation of the content requirements of the battery passport,” said Thomas Weber, president of German technical advisory academy, Acatech. “The newly published standard provides implementing companies with clarity on the specific data attributes to be collected for the battery passport. This marks another important step in bringing digital product passports into use and harnessing their extraordinary potential for circular value creation.”

The standard is available to download free of charge from DIN Media.

The United Nations has also developed standards and tools to help vehicle and battery makers identify which activities involved in their production and which elements of their ESG goals coordinate with local sustainability development goals and are more feasible to reinforce.

Here, Aleksej Kruekov, general manager of overseas service for the EMEA region at Chinese battery maker CATL, talks about how digital tools are central to the collaboration needed to manage a supply chain that is made more complex by the delivery of critical raw materials, battery transport and storage, maintenance and recycling.

Kruekov will be speaking about understanding the core logistics competencies in the battery supply chain at the forthcoming Automotive Logistics and Supply Chain Europe conference, which will be held in Bonn, Germany this March