Making energy transparent: the battery passport, powered by digital twins

Batteries are everywhere. Whether in cell phones, cars, or household appliances – their number continues to grow. Forecasts predict that global battery demand will increase by 25% annually until 2030. This is not surprising given the important role that batteries play in achieving the emission targets of the Green Deal: as a key tool for decarbonizing our energy production and electrifying mobility, batteries could achieve around 30% of the necessary reductions in the energy and transport sectors.

Transparency throughout the life cycle

At the same time, however, the growing demand faces a shortage of raw materials. This makes sustainable growth of the battery market all the more important, ensuring that the most is made of each battery throughout its entire life cycle – from low-resource and low-CO2 production to recycling and reuse. Above all, this requires transparency across all components and processes along the entire value chain of a battery.

As part of the Green Deal, the EU is therefore introducing a mandatory battery product passport for new batteries with a capacity of 2 kWh or more from February 2027. In this digital passport, manufacturers must document and make available the entire life cycle of their batteries. This should create transparency, enable benchmarking for the sustainability performance of batteries, and help establish a circular economy for batteries in the long term.

Digital twins as the keys

With just under two years to go before the law comes into force, battery producers and companies throughout the value chain need to address the issue of battery product passports with increasing urgency. So, what does this involve? Companies typically face three main challenges when it comes to battery product passports:

Volume and complexity of data

to track a battery throughout its entire life cycle, all companies involved in the value chain must collect, harmonize, and process a large amount of data.

Data security

all this data must be shared with stakeholders. However, different stakeholders need access to different data. This makes access controls and differentiated data distribution all the more important.

Regulatory requirements

at the same time, new and changing regulatory requirements must be met, in terms of both data exchange and the implementation of the product passport. Solutions should therefore be flexibly adaptable.

No matter how different the specific solutions to these problems may ultimately look, they all require a stable basis to handle the collected data. Digital twins are predestined for this: they enable manufacturers to trace each battery and all its components, from the raw materials to the end of its life cycle.

To ensure that the stored data can be provided to relevant stakeholders in a targeted manner, the digital twins must be centrally secured and managed in a solution with appropriate access controls. Ideally, all process steps should be automated – from the registration of each digital twin to the creation of the battery passport, which is made available to those responsible as conveniently as possible.

All functions in one solution

Solutions such as Bosch Semantic Stack provide the basis for these requirements by combining the most important tools in one solution. With the Digital Twin Registry, companies can easily register, identify, and manage millions of digital twins. Each digital twin is stored in the registry together with its aspects (i.e. grouped data on information such as master data, faults, or maintenance history) and the associated aspect model that defines the semantics.

For the administration and assignment of aspect models, Bosch Semantic Stack contains the Aspect Model Catalog, which acts like an evolving recipe book for all aspect models. It provides all the functions needed to manage all data using digital twins and to make it available in ecosystems such as Catena-X in a secure manner thanks to clear access restrictions.

NEW: Battery Passport from Bosch

But it doesn't stop there. To make it even easier and more convenient to create and share a digital product passport for batteries, we at Bosch Connected Industry have developed a new solution: the Battery Passport. Based on the tools of Bosch Semantic Stack, it helps battery manufacturers manage their battery data.

Via the Battery Passport, stakeholders can access specific information about individual batteries as a push and pull service. Both the registration of the digital twins for each battery and the creation of the battery passport for various stakeholder groups are automated to provide maximum convenience for users.

Would you like to know more about the Battery Passport, or do you need advice on implementing other sustainable applications?

Then contact us here.