EU Battery Regulation · Second life & repurposing

The passport problem in second-life batteries.

Reg. (EU) 2023/1542 · Article 77(7) · a repurposed battery needs a new passport linked to the passport(s) of the original batteries.

Second-life battery projects harvest modules from many retired EV packs and rebuild them into storage systems. Article 77(7) requires the rebuilt battery's passport to link back to every original passport. That is a genealogy requirement — and it cannot be met at scale if identity only exists at pack level, because the pack identity dies when the pack is opened.

Article 77(7)Annex XIIIModule genealogy18 Feb 2027EPCIS 2.0
What the rule requires

A required outcome with unspecified means.

Linked passports on repurposing

Article 77(7): a battery put to a new use gets a new passport linked to the original battery passports — many-to-one genealogy when modules from several packs are combined.

Disassembly-ready documentation

Annex XIII expects exploded diagrams, disassembly sequences, and cell count and layout — information that presumes the parts inside are identifiable.

History that travels with the module

Cycle counts, incident history and operating conditions determine a module's second-life value. Without identity, that history is lost the day the pack is opened.

An answer insurers and buyers accept

Second-life economics run on state-of-health confidence. A module that can prove its history commands a price; an anonymous module is scrap with ambitions.

The dates

The timeline, as it stands.

The obligation lands with the passport itself: batteries and their repurposed descendants placed on the market from 18 February 2027. Projects being engineered now decide whether compliance is possible later.

Battery passport18 Feb 2027
Repurposed-battery linkagewith Art 77
Second-life market scalegrowing to 2030
What to do now

Three moves that de-risk the deadline.

01 · Step

Tag modules before packs retire

Genealogy must exist before disassembly. Module-level identity applied at manufacture — or at collection — is what makes the 77(7) linkage possible at all.

02 · Step

Record the teardown as events

Each harvest, test and rebuild step should append to the custody log, so the new passport's link to its ancestors is evidence, not assertion.

03 · Step

Design the new passport first

Before rebuilding, define what the storage system's passport must carry and where each field comes from. Retrofitting genealogy after assembly is guesswork.

How Aeroz fits

Identity that survives the teardown.

Aeroz gives packs and modules chip-bound identities with custody written as EPCIS 2.0 events — so when a pack is opened, each module carries its own provable history into the rebuilt system, and the new passport's Article 77(7) linkage assembles itself from the log. This is the gap in the mandate: the law requires the outcome and specifies no means. We build the means.

FAQ

Battery passport for second life, answered.

What exactly does Article 77(7) require?

That a battery prepared for re-use, repurposing or remanufacturing carries a new battery passport linked to the passport or passports of the original battery or batteries. The plural matters: rebuilt systems combine modules from many source packs.

Why can't pack-level marking satisfy it?

Because the pack's QR marks the pack. Once opened, its modules carry no mandated identity of their own — and a storage rack built from thirty packs' modules has no honest way to link back to thirty passports.

Does the regulation mandate module-level tagging?

No — that is the gap. The regulation requires the linked-passport outcome without specifying the means. Module-level identity is how the outcome becomes achievable at industrial scale.

Who carries this obligation?

The economic operator placing the repurposed battery on the EU market. Second-life integrators, remanufacturers and the OEMs supplying them all inherit a piece of the answer.

Readiness audit

Know exactly where you stand — in 14 days.

A fixed-fee Aeroz audit maps your products against battery passport for second life requirements and returns a written readiness assessment, a data-mapping review, and a scoped pilot plan with cost and timeline.

Fixed fee 14-day written report No commitment to proceed