The BASE project is exploring the foundational challenges that shape the future of Digital Battery Passports (DBPs) well before deployment begins. Through early methodological development and cross-value-chain collaboration, BASE is uncovering critical insights into data interoperability, safety logic, circularity, predictive analytics, and regulatory readiness. This article, authored by one of the BASE Consortium members, Seraph., shares early lessons from the project and reflects on the quiet but structural challenges that will define effective DBP implementation across the battery lifecycle.
Although the BASE project has not yet entered the demonstration phase of the four use-cases, the past months of methodological development, partner exchanges, and technical groundwork have already revealed a set of early signals - patterns that appear consistently across our research work, manufacturing, operations, repurposing, and recycling contexts.
These signals are crucial because they foreshadow where the Digital Battery Passport (DBP) will create the most friction, the most learning, and ultimately the most value once deployment begins. In other words, the challenges are already visible long before the first battery enters a DBP workflow.
The First Signal: Data Exists - But Not in the Form Anyone Expects
Across all partners in the BASE project, a consistent theme is emerging: Battery-related data is widely available, but rarely in a DBP-ready format.
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) often hold detailed technical datasets, designed for internal quality control. Operators generate long-term behavioural histories. Repurposing companies focus on current state information, focusing on performance and safety, while recyclers work with visual inspection or structural conditions.
In all cases, the data was created to prioritise the stage in which it was created rather than a continuous lifecycle narrative.
This exposes a foundational reality: industrial battery data was never designed to flow across the value chain. It was created to solve local problems - optimise assembly, monitor performance, diagnose failures, or ensure safe handling - not to be stitched together into a continuous narrative from mine to recycling plant.
The DBP introduces, perhaps for the first time, the expectation that these isolated data worlds must speak to each other. BASE is revealing just how substantial the gap is between data abundance and data interoperability, and how much work lies in translating one stage’s logic into another’s needs.
The Second Signal: Safety Data Is Deep, but Safety Logic Is Siloed
The development of the State of Safety (SoS) methodology has exposed another structural challenge. Every actor along the lifecycle has developed safety routines that work extremely well in isolation, yet rely on different assumptions. OEMs depend on continuous telemetry; service centres rely on external inspection; logistics operators depend on environmental monitoring; recyclers work without a Battery Management System (BMS) entirely.
What is becoming clear is that a DBP-enabled safety framework cannot simply merge these practices; it must translate between them. A voltage anomaly that is trivial for an OEM to interpret becomes ambiguous in a second-life environment; a deformation easily identified in recycling has no numerical equivalent upstream.
BASE is helping make these inconsistencies visible, not as errors, but as the natural consequence of designing safety for separate environments. The challenge is semantic alignment.
The Third Signal: Circularity Is a Data Problem Long Before It Is a Business Problem
Partners working on environmental, social and governance (ESG) and life cycle assessment (LCA have begun to experience a recurring constraint: sustainability insights heavily depend on supplier input, but suppliers vary significantly in their readiness to provide structured, verifiable information. Some can offer detailed breakdowns; others provide ranges or proxies; some are unable to disclose specifics due to confidentiality or commercial limitations.
This early signal is important because it reframes the challenge. Circularity is about designing data ecosystems capable of reflecting reality in a verifiable way. BASE is surfacing the practical limits of that reflection. The DBP can function as a regulatory tool only if it becomes a shared language across suppliers who have historically never needed to speak to each other at this level of detail.
The Fourth Signal: Predictive Analytics Is Only as Strong as the Weakest Dataset
Our work on State of X (SoX) methodologies and future remaining useful life (RUL) modelling is already highlighting a constraint that will become central during deployments: predictive analytics does not struggle with complexity - it struggles with inconsistency. In first-life EV applications, data continuity is nearly perfect. But once a battery transitions into logistics, service, or second-life environments, measurement precision drops and historical completeness evaporates.
This creates a forecasting paradox: the batteries that most need predictive models - those entering uncertain or high-risk environments - are the ones with the most fragmented data histories. BASE is revealing this gap early, which gives us room to design modelling approaches that embrace uncertainty rather than collapse under it. The challenge ahead is to make predictions meaningful even when the context is incomplete.
The Fifth Signal: Regulatory Readiness Is Unequal - and Often Overestimated
Across partners, another subtle pattern is emerging: many organisations believe they are close to regulatory readiness until they inspect the details of the EU Battery Regulation. The moment the requirements are examined through the DBP lens, assumptions change.
Data that was previously nice to have becomes mandatory. Processes that worked internally suddenly require cross-organisational traceability. Sustainability metrics that were handled narratively must become quantifiable.
This does not mean partners are unprepared. It means the regulation is structurally transformative. BASE is revealing, even in the early stages, that compliance is less about collecting new data and more about re-architecting organisational thinking.
The Sixth Signal: Interoperability Will Be the Defining Challenge of the DBP Era
Perhaps the clearest signal so far is this: no partner sees themselves as the bottleneck, but every partner sees the bottleneck in someone else’s part of the chain.
Manufacturers expect operators to provide datasets that operators never needed to collect. Operators rely on historical data that manufacturers do not store in sufficient granularity. Recyclers depend on information that was never captured because upstream actors had no incentive to do so.
The deeper insight is this: the DBP is asking for data to travel across a value chain – the very same data that was never built for continuity. Every dataset was born for its own environment, its own purpose, its own logic. DBP, in this sense,e brings interoperability directly. It is about connecting databases and datasets, but indirectly, it is about reconciling cultures, practices, and assumptions that evolved in isolation.
How BASE’s Work Ties Into DBP Development
The BASE project is directly addressing these early signals by developing methodological frameworks and technical solutions that facilitate DBP readiness. Engaging partners across manufacturing, operations, repurposing and recycling helps BASE to design DBP workflows that prioritise semantic alignment, interoperability and regulatory compliance.
The project is building the foundations for data coherence, ensuring that battery information can be shared and understood consistently across the value chain.
These early insights position BASE to not only meet regulatory requirements but also help stakeholders adopt best practices for sustainable battery management, circular economy implementation and life cycle transparency.
Closing Reflection: Early Signals as Strategic Advantage
Although BASE is still in the preparatory phase, these early signals form a strategic map of what the deployments will encounter. They highlight where integration will require negotiation, where safety logic will demand translation, where data scarcity will shape predictive models, and where regulation will force operational redesign.
Most importantly, they reveal that Digital Battery Passports are not simply technical tools - they are coordination mechanisms, reshaping how entire industries exchange meaning, not just data.
Identifying these challenges now, before deployments begin, gives the project a rare advantage: the ability to design with foresight and show others how not to respond with urgency. The early phases of BASE are already teaching us that the DBP era will be defined by data coherence - and that coherence is something the project is uniquely positioned to build.
The BASE project has received funding from the Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON) Research and Innovation Actions under grant agreement No. 101157200.