By Anna Gumbau | EURACTIV.com
29-11-2022
An employee attaches a battery to a Kona automobile on the production line at Hyundai Motor Manufacturing Czech plant in Nosovice, Czech Republic, 13 October 2022. [EPA-EFE/MARTIN DIVISEK]
This article is part of our special report Product passports: The new trend in EU policymaking.
While EU co-legislators are still busy discussing the details of the EU Battery Regulation, lobbyists following this file are already bracing themselves for a tsunami of secondary legislation that will decide on every technical aspect of battery manufacturing and recycling.
It’s been nearly two years since the European Commission published its proposal for an EU Battery Regulation, a product that is still unregulated in the bloc’s single market and that is meant to play a crucial role in the transition to electric mobility.
Beyond transport, batteries are shaping up to play a central role in the green and digital transition via devices like smartphones or portable computers that have become pervasive in our daily lives.
So-called trialogue talks between the Commission, the European Parliament and the Council are still ongoing, with several issues still outstanding, such as due diligence for raw material supply chains or requirements over material recovery and recycling.
EU negotiators hope to reach a compromise on the Battery Regulation during a final trialogue session scheduled for December 9.
In the meantime, car manufacturers and the entire supply chain of battery makers who are closely following the legislation are already bracing themselves for a tsunami of secondary legislation that will follow the adoption of the regulation.
While the EU Battery Regulation is meant to provide a general framework, a lot of technical aspects will be decided in secondary legislation – in so-called “delegated acts” and “implementing acts”.
Implementing acts are adopted by the Commission after consulting an expert committee comprised of experts appointed by the 27 member states, therefore giving EU capitals a greater say. In contrast, delegated acts can only be rejected by the Parliament or the Council, but they cannot amend it like they do with ordinary legislation.
It is expected that as many as 32 delegated and implementing acts will complement the EU’s Battery Regulation.
All the technical information collected under those implementing rules will become available in a digital “battery passport” that will track the origin of all materials and components used in the manufacturing process of batteries.
Digital product passports are becoming a central instrument to track the components and origin of raw materials used in all kinds of consumer goods.
Because batteries are such complex products to regulate, experts agree that this is the right approach.
“It makes sense to approach these technical aspects with delegated acts as currently batteries are a completely unregulated product, which is used in so many applications, and that shows the complexity of the regulation,” said Rita Tedesco, Head of Energy Transition at the Environmental Coalition on Standards (ECOS), an NGO.
“We will only see the actual shape of the Battery Regulation once all these pieces are adopted,” she explains.
The downside is that following the detail of these technical rules and regulations will be difficult, if not impossible for civil society groups with fewer resources.
“It might result in a continuous process over the coming years where stakeholders are required to follow the development of many implementing or delegated acts,” said Mark Mistry, public policy manager at the Nickel Institute, the global association of primary nickel producers.
“Independent of where concrete targets and numbers are decided upon: they should be based on technical feasibility, stakeholder consultations and impact assessments, taking into account environmental and socio-economic implications,” he told EURACTIV.
And even though secondary legislation is supposed to deal only with technical aspects, some of those implementing rules can be politically sensitive.
These include requirements on due diligence that companies must comply with, the battery’s carbon footprint calculation, and the methodologies to calculate recovery targets and recycling efficiencies.
“These delegated acts will also have to define performance classes and maximum thresholds that will tell us whether a battery’s carbon footprint is too high for it to be placed on the EU market,” said Tedesco from ECOS.
How these calculations are designed could make or break the ambition of the EU Battery Regulation, experts believe.
For instance, these delegated acts will define how companies will be allowed to count and report their green energy use. How this is calculated will be “key to avoiding a greenwashing exercise,” said Alex Keynes, clean vehicles manager at Transport & Environment (T&E), a clean mobility NGO.
“We need to avoid a situation where companies can claim use of renewables by simply buying cheap green offsets in the form of guarantees of origin and without any real world link to the energy they are actually using to make the battery,” Keynes added.]
According to calculations by S&P Global Mobility, global lithium-ion manufacturing capacity is expected to more than double by 2025. As battery production continues to ramp up internationally, the EU could set the standards for sustainable batteries worldwide, says Tedesco.
“Ambitious enough delegated acts can keep too polluting batteries out of Europe, and have a knock-on effect on the rest of the world, making batteries more sustainable everywhere,” Tedesco said.
The EU’s upcoming battery regulation aims to position the bloc as a major player in the global battery value chain. Despite positives, there are still some areas to resolve before the legislation becomes law, write Abhishek Gupta, Maya Ben Dror, and Tilmann Vahle.
[Edited by Frédéric Simon]
