CEN and CENELEC set up the Battery2Life workshop: two CWAs on interoperable battery management systems (BMS) for second-life batteries from electric vehicles
On 30 September 2026 CEN-CENELEC announced the CEN/CLC Workshop “Battery2Life — Interoperable BMS principles”, which is to prepare guidance for interoperable battery management systems in second-life applications. The kick-off meeting is planned remotely on 4 November 2026, and comments on the draft project plan are accepted until 30 October.
- According to the announcement, electric vehicle batteries lose on average about 2.3% of capacity per year, and after about 10 years or 160,000 km their nominal capacity is 70–80% — the so-called First-Life End-Of-Life threshold. Such a battery no longer meets automotive requirements but can still be used for other purposes.
- Two CWAs will be developed: Part 1 on principles of an interoperable BMS with a hybrid cloud/edge architecture and state machine diagrams of BMS processes, and Part 2 with two use cases — industrial load levelling and domestic storage. According to the plan the CWAs will not address BMS safety requirements, although the BMS is a safety-related component.
- The workshop is to complement the work of CLC/TC 21X “Secondary cells and batteries”, CEN/TC 301 “Road vehicles” and CLC/SR 120 “Electrical Energy Storage (EES) Systems”, and the draft plan links it to Regulation (EU) 2023/1542 on batteries. Among desired participants the plan lists battery manufacturers, research institutes and test institutes for batteries.
- The proposer is the Greek institute ICCS on behalf of the Battery2Life project funded by Horizon Europe (grant agreement No 101137615, ending on 31 December 2026), and the secretariat is held by the Spanish standards body UNE. Three workshop meetings are planned and the documents will be written in English.