For two years the Digital Product Passport has mostly been a set of legal texts and roadmap slides. This month it turned into something you can actually test against. The EU battery passport — the first DPP that becomes legally mandatory, on 18 February 2027 — now has a published set of technical standards, a public test environment, and a downloadable data model. The central EU registry that ties it all together is due to be stood up in the second half of 2026.
If you sell batteries into the EU, this is your implementation blueprint. If you sell anything else, pay attention anyway: the battery passport is the working prototype for the Digital Product Passport that ESPR will eventually require across almost every product category. The architecture being proven on batteries right now is the same architecture your product will inherit.
What BatteryPass-Ready Just Launched
The news comes from BatteryPass-Ready, a project co-funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) and run by Fraunhofer IPK, acatech (the National Academy of Science and Engineering), TU Berlin, and GEFEG, with the VDA, VDMA, ZIV, and Bitkom as associated partners. It grew out of the earlier Battery Pass project — in other words, about as close to the source of DPP implementation thinking as you can get.
Three things landed together:
A public test environment. Manufacturers, suppliers, recyclers, and software providers can now run their battery-passport data through a validation platform that checks it for completeness and for compliance with the EU Battery Regulation, ESPR, and the JTC 24 standards. It runs 11 common test scenarios — including interoperability tests where an external partner requests your passport data and the system checks that it comes back complete, in the correct format, and respecting the right access permissions.
A concrete data model. The test environment validates against the Battery Passport Data Attribute Longlist v1.3, published on GitLab — a spreadsheet defining 100 data attributes across seven categories (identifiers, labels and conformity, carbon footprint, supply-chain due diligence, materials, circularity, and performance and durability). For each attribute it specifies the definition, the unit, whether it is public or restricted, and whether it is static or changes over the battery's life. This is the most precise public statement yet of what a battery passport actually has to contain.
A technical playbook. A companion publication, User Stories from a Technical Perspective, translates the regulation and standards into concrete business processes — registering a battery, reading and updating passport data, and handling end-of-life — down to the specific API methods involved.
The Standards Are Finished (Mostly)
For a long time, the honest answer to "what technical standard does a DPP actually follow?" was "it's being written." That stopped being true in May 2026, when six CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 standards were published:
| Standard | What it covers |
|---|---|
| EN 18216:2026 | Data exchange protocols |
| EN 18219:2026 | Unique identifiers |
| EN 18220:2026 | Data carriers (QR codes and the like) |
| EN 18221:2026 | Data storage, archiving, and persistence |
| EN 18222:2026 | APIs for the passport lifecycle |
| EN 18223:2026 | System interoperability |
Two more — prEN 18239 (access-rights management) and prEN 18246 (data authentication) — remain in draft, with approval expected around the third quarter of 2026.
One distinction is worth keeping straight: these standards are published, but not yet cited in the EU's Official Journal as harmonized. Following them doesn't yet grant a formal presumption of conformity, and for now the Battery Regulation legally binds only the ISO/IEC 15459 identifier standard. In practice, though, JTC 24 is the technical blueprint every serious implementer is now building to — which is why a finished, published version of it matters.
Why should a fashion or furniture brand care about a battery standard? Because JTC 24 is horizontal. These standards were written to be the common technical basis for DPPs across sectors, not just batteries. The identifier scheme, the data-carrier rules, the access-tier model, and the API surface being validated on batteries today are the same building blocks that will carry your product's passport tomorrow.
The battery passport is a rehearsal for everyone else. ESPR sets the general DPP framework; the Battery Regulation is just the first sector to switch it on. Watching how the battery passport gets built now is the cheapest way to see where your own category is heading.
The EU Registry Is Coming Into View
The other piece is the EC Registry — the central index established under Article 13 of the ESPR. It does not store your passport content; it holds the identifiers and registration data that make a passport discoverable, and it links to where the real data is hosted. The Commission is expected to stand it up around July 2026.
Two caveats matter. First, the implementing act that defines exactly how the registry works is still in draft, so specifics can change. Second — and this is the reassuring part for smaller sellers — the registry going live is a deadline for the Commission, not for you. Your obligation to register a battery passport begins with the product obligation in February 2027, not the day the registry opens.
What the standards do make concrete is how registration will work: the API method that submits a passport to the registry takes a product identifier, a passport identifier, an economic-operator identifier, and the address where the passport is hosted, and returns a registration ID. If you are choosing a passport provider, this is worth asking about now.
Who Needs a Battery Passport?
The battery passport obligation from 18 February 2027 covers:
- Electric-vehicle (EV) batteries
- Light-means-of-transport (LMT) batteries — e-bikes, e-scooters, and similar
- Industrial batteries above 2 kWh — including stationary energy storage
Crucially, there is no small-business exemption, and no geographic escape hatch: if you place these batteries on the EU market, the obligation applies whether your company sits in Berlin, Istanbul, or Shenzhen. That mirrors the ESPR's own approach — the obligation follows the product to market, not the company's home address.
"Not required until 2027" is not the same as "nothing to do now." A battery passport carries roughly 100 data attributes, many of them supplier data — recycled-content shares, carbon-footprint figures, cell-chemistry details — that you don't hold and can't produce overnight. The brands that treat 2026 as data-collection time are the ones who won't be scrambling in early 2027.
What to Do With This
Whether or not you sell batteries, the release is a clear signal that the DPP is moving from principle to plumbing. A few practical moves:
- If you make in-scope batteries: pull the Data Attribute Longlist v1.3 and map it against the data you actually hold today. The gaps — usually carbon footprint, recycled content, and due-diligence reporting — are the ones that take months of supplier engagement to close.
- If you sell any other product: treat the battery passport as a preview. The DPP timeline shows textiles and other categories following the same path, and the data you should be collecting overlaps far more than most brands expect.
- Ask your passport provider the hard questions. Do they follow the JTC 24 standards? Can they produce a registry-ready record and expose passport data over a standards-based API? "We render a nice QR page" is no longer a complete answer.
For battery makers, the passport is now a concrete spec to build against, with a hard date attached. Everyone else gets a detailed preview of where their own category is headed — and more time to act on it than the battery sector had.
PassportCraft builds battery passports on this exact model — the v1.3 data attributes, the public/restricted access tiers, and a standards-based data carrier — alongside textile and general-product passports. You can structure your data now and be ready well ahead of the February 2027 obligation. See our full guide to the EU battery passport.
Frequently Asked Questions
When does the EU battery passport become mandatory?
The battery passport is required from 18 February 2027 for EV batteries, light-means-of-transport (LMT) batteries, and industrial batteries with a capacity above 2 kWh placed on the EU market. It is the first Digital Product Passport to carry a hard legal deadline.
Are the DPP technical standards actually finished?
Six CEN/CENELEC JTC 24 standards — EN 18216 (data exchange), 18219 (identifiers), 18220 (data carriers), 18221 (storage), 18222 (APIs), and 18223 (interoperability) — were published in May 2026. Two more, prEN 18239 (access-rights management) and prEN 18246 (data authentication), remain in draft with approval expected around Q3 2026. One caveat: published is not the same as harmonized (cited in the Official Journal), which is what grants a formal presumption of conformity — that step hasn't happened yet.
What is the BatteryPass-Ready test environment?
It is a public platform, released in 2026 by BatteryPass-Ready (a project co-funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy), that lets companies validate their battery-passport data for completeness and for compliance with the EU Battery Regulation, ESPR, and JTC 24 standards, across 11 common test scenarios including interoperability checks.
Does the battery passport apply to non-EU companies?
Yes. The obligation follows the product onto the EU market, not the company's location. A manufacturer or importer placing in-scope batteries on the EU market must provide a battery passport regardless of where the business is based, and there are no small-business exemptions.
Why does the battery passport matter if I don't sell batteries?
The JTC 24 standards are horizontal — designed as the common technical basis for Digital Product Passports across all sectors, not just batteries. The identifiers, data carriers, access tiers, and APIs being proven on the battery passport now are the same ones textile and other ESPR passports will use, so the battery rollout is an early preview of your own category's requirements.
About the author
Irina Aguiar is a co-founder of PassportCraft, where she translates EU product-compliance law into practical guidance for small brands. Her work covers the Digital Product Passport across ESPR product groups — textiles, batteries, electronics, and furniture — alongside GS1 Digital Link data carriers, recyclability and substance-of-concern reporting, and the delegated-act timelines brands need to plan around. She focuses on turning dense regulatory text into checklists a founder can actually act on.
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