03 — Blog
The EU battery passport deadline: 18 February 2027
On 18 February 2027, the EU battery passport stops being a plan and becomes an obligation. If your company places batteries on the EU market, this is the date to work back from.
Which batteries need a passport
Article 77 of the EU Battery Regulation, Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, makes the battery passport mandatory from 18 February 2027 for:
- Electric vehicle batteries
- Light means of transport (LMT) batteries, the kind in e-bikes and e-scooters
- Industrial batteries with a capacity above 2 kWh
Each passport is reached through a QR code on the battery, and its information has to stay current for the battery's whole life.
A passport is not a sticker
It's tempting to treat the passport as a label: print a QR code, link it to a page, done. The regulation asks for more than that. A battery's story keeps changing after it leaves the factory. It gets sold, installed, repaired, tested, maybe given a second life, and finally recycled. Every one of those steps is done by a different company.
If each company keeps its own copy of the facts, the copies drift apart, and nobody can say which one is true.
One battery, one record
That's the idea behind BPN, the Battery Passport Network. It is a registry: every battery has exactly one record, and every company that touches the battery writes to that same record.
- The manufacturer creates the record.
- The importer and distributor add what happens when the battery reaches the market.
- A repairer logs service and state of health.
- An auditor verifies.
- The recycler closes the loop.
Every entry is signed by the organisation that made it. Nothing is quietly overwritten: a correction is a new entry, so the history is tamper-evident.
Who can see what
The regulation doesn't divide passport data into public and private. It defines audiences. Some information is open to everyone. Some is only for persons with a legitimate interest, such as repairers, second-life operators and recyclers. Some is only for authorities.
BPN sets access per field and per entity type. The carbon footprint can be public. Dismantling and safety instructions can be visible to recyclers and repairers. Compliance results can be reserved for market surveillance authorities. It's the same record, with a different view for each audience.
Under the hood, briefly
BPN runs on a permissioned shared ledger, Hyperledger Fabric 2.5, with Go chaincode that enforces the battery schema and the access rules, a gateway API for sign-in and integrations, and a Next.js dashboard. It is the first use case of CORA (Certified Origin & Record Assurance): traceability for anything whose history matters.
Where it stands
BPN is in pilot. It isn't publicly deployed yet, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. The registry runs in the pilot environment and I can walk you through it live.
If you make or import batteries for the EU market, see how BPN works or ask for a demo.