The European Union’s battery passport requirement takes effect on 18 February 2027. Sunwoda Power, a Chinese cell maker that started in consumer batteries and now sits in the top tier of power and storage suppliers, began building for it in November 2023, when much of the technical detail had not been written.
The company’s reasoning was not regulatory enthusiasm. It was a judgement that competition in batteries was shifting from performance, cost and delivery toward lifecycle management, and that a passport could not be assembled at short notice.
Why start early
Under EU regulation 2023/1542, batteries placed on the European market must carry a digital passport from 2027. The file has to document raw material provenance, carbon performance and supply chain responsibility, which turns a product feature into a data problem spanning procurement, manufacturing, quality and IT.
“The battery passport is not a simple software project,” a Sunwoda Power executive told Gasgoo. “It is a systems engineering task that has to run through research, manufacturing, purchasing, quality, sustainability and information technology.”
Collecting, verifying and reconciling supply chain data takes longer than writing the software. Companies that wait for the final rules will run out of time.
Two pilots and a test registry
In 2024, two Sunwoda projects were selected among the Global Battery Alliance’s ten pilots of the year: a lithium iron phosphate passport with Potevio and SAIC Maxus, and a second LFP project with Li Auto. It was one of two companies with two projects on the list.
In 2026 the company joined the GBA operational trials in two consortia, one with Li Auto and one with Voyah. In June 2026 its platform completed system-level integration with the test environment of the EU CirPass registry, covering identity authentication, data submission and registry verification.
The last 30 per cent
Sunwoda’s platform rests on three layers. An AIoT layer collects lifecycle data and tracks carbon footprint parameters in near real time. An interoperability layer speaks to both EU and Chinese data spaces including Catena-X. A blockchain layer hashes records, timestamps them and uses zero-knowledge proofs to protect commercially sensitive fields while allowing verification.
Automated capture now covers more than 70 per cent of the record. The remainder depends on supplier reporting, manual review and third-party validation.
The company is candid about where it gets harder. Deeper supply chain tiers mean more intermediaries, weaker visibility, uneven data capability among suppliers and commercial secrecy around transactions. Its answer is not to centralise everything but to define clear data responsibility and trusted sharing rules.
Sunwoda also has to reconcile two rulebooks at once: the EU carbon footprint methodology and the Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology’s battery carbon reporting system. Its approach is a single data foundation with method-specific calculation on top, so suppliers are not asked to submit the same figures twice.
The company frames 2027 not as a finish line but as the point where lifecycle data management moves into volume operation, and where a compliance cost has to become something a customer will pay for.
Editor’s note: This is an adapted translation of the original Gasgoo report. It has been trimmed and restructured for readability for an international business audience. The full original (in Chinese) is at https://auto.gasgoo.com/news/202611/6I70477079C501.shtml.