Battery presumption of conformity: six articles, one standard

Anyone placing a battery pack on the market will be asked, from 18 February 2027, for the detailed composition of the electrodes and the dismantling diagrams by someone who presents themselves as a remanufacturer: they will have to answer yes or no, and today no European act tells them who holds the right to ask.

Both mistakes cost the same. Opening up to someone without entitlement means handing a third party the cathode recipe; refusing someone entitled means facing a market surveillance authority with a denial to justify. That line was to be drawn by the Commission by 18 August 2026. On 16 September it did publish something on batteries, but it is a different thing, and it covers less than the headline suggests.

One harmonised standard, four years and nine months after the request

The Official Journal of the European Union, L series 2026/2048 of 16 September 2026, carries Commission Implementing Decision (EU) 2026/2048 of 14 September 2026, in force on the day of publication. Its annex contains a single line: the standard “EN 18060:2025”, titled “Road vehicles- Rechargeable batteries with internal energy storage- Performance and durability of alkali-Ion (Li-Ion, Na-Ion), Pb, NiMH and combined chemistries EV modules and batteries”. It is the first harmonised standard drafted in support of Regulation (EU) 2023/1542. The standardisation request to CEN and CENELEC is Decision C(2021) 8614 of 7 December 2021: four years and nine months passed between the request and the first standard.

The annex does not state which requirements of the regulation the standard covers: no article, no clause. And the text of the standard is bought from the standardisation bodies: the reference is public, the content is not. The manufacturer has to buy it and work out alone, under their own responsibility, how far the coverage reaches.

The presumption applies to six articles. The standard touches one

Article 15(3) provides that batteries conforming to harmonised standards published in the Official Journal “shall be presumed to be in conformity with the requirements laid down in Articles 9, 10, 12, 13, 14 and 78 to the extent that those requirements are covered by such harmonised standards or parts thereof”. Six articles, read in the consolidated text as at 13 August 2026: performance and durability of portable batteries of general use (Article 9, minimum values deferred to a delegated act due by 18 August 2027); performance and durability of rechargeable industrial batteries above 2 kWh, light means of transport batteries and electric vehicle batteries (Article 10, already applicable since 18 August 2024); safety of stationary battery energy storage systems, where since 18 August 2024 “state-of-the-art testing methodologies shall be used” (Article 12); labelling and marking, with the QR code mandatory from 18 February 2027 (Article 13); state of health and expected lifetime inside the battery management system (Article 14); technical design and operation of the passport (Article 78).

Yesterday’s standard concerns the performance and durability of modules and batteries for road vehicles: Article 10 territory, and not even all of it. For anyone assembling stationary storage systems the arithmetic is immediate: Article 12 has applied for two years and has no harmonised standard, so there is no presumption to invoke. Choice of test methods, defensibility and documentary trail sit with the manufacturer, in Emilia’s manufacturing base as anywhere else.

The restricted level of the passport still has no addressees

Article 77(9) is explicit: “By 18 August 2026, the Commission shall adopt implementing acts specifying which persons are to be considered persons with a legitimate interest as referred to in points 2 and 4 respectively of Annex XIII”. That deadline expired a month ago.

We looked for the act without going through the words of its title, which is the weakest method: two queries against the Cellar repository of the Publications Office, over the graph of relations between acts. With a legal basis in Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 there are only Delegated Regulation (EU) 2025/606 on recycling efficiency, Implementing Regulation (EU) 2025/2289 on data reporting formats, a Commission notice of 10 January 2025 and a report of 11 September 2026. Among the acts citing the regulation, 2026 brings Implementing Regulation (EU) 2026/1778 on the digital product passport registry, the Battery booster strategy and yesterday’s decision. None of them is the act under Article 77(9): as at today’s date, according to this search, it does not appear to have been adopted.

The gap is visible inside the regulation itself. Article 78 — one of the six covered by the presumption — sets among its essential requirements that consumers and economic operators shall have access to the passport free of charge and “based on their respective access rights set out in Annex XIII and the implementing act adopted pursuant to Article 77(9)”. An essential requirement points to an act that does not exist, and no harmonised standard can fill that in.

Meanwhile the public level moved quietly. The corrigendum of 10 April 2026 (OJ L, 2026/90285) corrects Annex XIII, point 1(q): where the 2023 text referred to “Article 13(3) and (4)”, it now reads “Article 13(4) and (5)”. Anyone who mapped their public fields onto the original text was pointing at the wrong paragraphs for almost three years. We wrote about the three levels of Article 77 and the boundary with trade secrets in our note on the battery passport from 18 February 2027.

Why a closed system is needed

There is no rule here to apply: there is a decision to take on your own and to defend later. Which fields of the technical file are trade secrets, to whom they open, on what grounds, and how far the coverage of EN 18060:2025 reaches on the individual model. These are judgements formed on supply specifications, bills of materials, test reports, in-house legal opinions and the paid text of the standard: documents that cannot leave the company, still less end up in the prompt of an external service that retains and re-uses them. An open-weight model inside the client’s perimeter works on those documents without moving them, and every proposed classification stays on record with the date, the source and the version of the text it was taken on. When the implementing act arrives, the review does not restart from scratch: the official list is compared with the decisions already taken, whatever diverges is updated, and an inspector can be shown why that choice was made in the meantime.

What we do not know

The limit of the method has to be stated first: a search over the graph of citations and legal bases finds what has been indexed with those relations. An act just adopted, published in another form, or carrying incomplete metadata may escape it. That is why we write that the act does not appear to have been adopted as at today’s date, according to this search, and not that it has not been adopted. We do not know which requirements the Commission regards as covered by EN 18060:2025: the decision does not say so, and we have not read the standard — it is a paid document, and we report only the published reference. Finally, we have not checked whether a draft of the missing act exists in consultation channels: we looked for the adopted act, not the proposal.

The two axes, applied

Complying. In our system, Article 15(3) becomes a control that reads the technical documentation of every model and flags, requirement by requirement, where the presumption of conformity exists and where it is missing, with the reasoning for the chosen test method and the trail ready for an inspection.

Deciding. The same system holds supply specifications, bills of materials, test reports and legal opinions together in a single operating model, on which AI agents run the proposed classification and coverage assessment with an operator in command who approves or corrects. For large enterprises, defence, public administration and healthcare. Always in two delivery modes: on-premise, on standalone machines that require no deep integration into the client’s network, or dedicated cloud, with a dedicated VPN and data centres in Italy — always with shared management.

From the first session, at no cost, you get the dated map of your battery models: which requirements are today left without a presumption of conformity, and which passport fields are still classified against a superseded text. It stays with you even if we do not carry on together. Talk it through with one of our engineers.