Press Releases
June 20th 2024 - Brussels, Belgium
The pilots are the world's largest, pre-competitive effort by battery cell manufacturers to establish comparable battery passports and represent a major milestone towards establishing a sustainable and transparent battery value chain by 2030
The Global Battery Alliance, the largest multistakeholder organization in the energy storage space, bringing together over 160 members across the battery value chain and the wider ecosystem including public organizations, NGOs, labour unions and academia, today launches the second wave of its Battery Passport pilots including 11 pilot consortia.
Building on the successful launch of the world’s first Battery Passport proof of concept in January 2023 led by Audi, and Tesla and involving Contemporary Amperex Technology Limited (CATL), LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI, Eurasian Resources Group (ERG) and others, the second wave of pilots will establish the Minimum Viable Product of the GBA Battery Passport, complete with a product level ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) score. The GBA has established 11 separate pilot consortia led by global battery manufacturers including CALB Group Co. Ltd., Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), EVE Energy Co., Ltd , Farasis Energy, FinDreams Battery, LG Energy Solution, Samsung SDI and Sunwoda, together representing over 80% of the global electric vehicle battery market share. Working in a unique pre-competitive setting, the pilots also involve seven independent track and trace solution providers including Circularise, Circulor, Glassdome, Nanjing Fuchuang Intelligent Manufacturing Technology Co., Ltd., RCS Global - an SLR company, Shenzhen Dianlian Technology, and Shenzhen Precise Testing Technology Co., Ltd.
The battery industry for electric mobility and energy storage is forecast to grow 17-fold by 2030, driven by global commitments to triple global renewable energy capacity by 2030 in line with COP28 targets. Mainstreaming sustainability into this rapidly growing industry from the outset is a critical priority: sustainable battery value chains are resilient value chains and the opportunities associated with this growth can contribute meaningfully to making the green transition a just transition. In the context of increasing geo-strategic competition, the GBA pilots send a powerful message about the potential for international, pre-competitive collaboration to scale a sustainable battery value chain.
The GBA flagship initiative, the Battery Passport is a transparency and accountability framework, building on requirements from battery sustainability regulations – including but not limited to the EU Battery Regulation – and voluntary standards into a comprehensive framework of globally harmonized, traceable, and comparable performance metrics at the product level. Reporting against Battery Passport rulebooks will facilitate benchmarking and the calculation of a GBA ESG score. By issuing a score aimed at investors, procurement divisions and consumers, the GBA seeks to contribute to building a platform or marketplace where products compete on independently validated and verifiable sustainability performance, triggering continuous improvement and a race to the top.
The second wave of pilots aims to enhance and accelerate the realization of the GBA vision of sustainable, circular and responsible battery value chains and is significantly expanding the scope of the 2023 proof of concept. Pilot participants will report on seven rulebooks developed by multistakeholder working groups convened by the GBA which set out harmonized sustainability performance expectations for seven key metrics including the previously tested Greenhouse Gas rulebook to calculate the battery carbon footprint, human rights and child labour indices and the newly developed rulebooks on Forced Labour, Indigenous Peoples’ Rights, Biodiversity and Circular Design of batteries. Based on the reporting by value chain participants across the pilot consortia, differentiated ESG scores will be issued, a major steppingstone incentivizing companies to go beyond compliance in addressing sustainability risks and impacts along the value chain.
The GBA’s public-private global platform enables precompetitive collaboration with commercial battery passport solution providers working towards greater harmonization and interoperability of standards and solutions and representing an important milestone in mainstreaming GBA’s sustainability performance expectations as a globally recognized benchmark for sustainable battery products. Importantly, the current wave of pilots will introduce elements of data assurance to contribute to the secure sharing of trusted information.
The GBA expects to publish the results of the pilots by the end of year on the GBA website.
Inga Petersen, Executive Director of the GBA said: “We are thrilled to be officially launching our second wave of battery passport pilots. The launch of the world’s first battery passport proof of concept in January 2023 afforded us invaluable insights and learnings which we are actively applying in this next phase. Seeing the incredible level of interest and engagement by battery manufacturers, their value chains from mining companies to electric vehicle manufacturers and independent solution providers across the 11 pilot consortia gives us great confidence in the potential for international, pre-competitive collaboration and our ability to create trusted sustainability scores for batteries as an essential instrument to establish sustainable, responsible and circular battery value chains by 2030.”
Please contact secretariat@globalbattery.org in case of any questions
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