A partner at a major British law firm has said that Britain is ‘likely’ to emulate EU regulations on waste batteries in the coming years.
In conversation with our sister site Energy storage.news, Suriya Edwards, construction and engineering partner at law firm Freeths, highlighted some of the key issues with the lack of legislation for end-of-life batteries in BESS or EV applications, as well as the ways in which EU policy is leading the way on environmental responsibility for batteries.
The EU recently introduced the Batteries Regulation, a piece of legislation that requires all batteries to contain a minimum of recycled content, and created the Battery Passport, a digital register of every single battery made in the EU. Each battery made includes a QR code with information about its production and material content, making recycling these batteries much easier.
Current UK legislation leaves significant loopholes allowing unscrupulous developers to avoid responsibility at the end of a project’s life. Current regulatory requirements for battery decommissioning, which assign responsibility for disposing, recycling or reusing end-of-life BESS systems, will expire after just one year, well before a grid-scale BESS project would ever be decommissioned .
As such, Edwards believes Britain will eventually introduce something similar to the EU battery regulation to close the loophole on battery end-of-life. He calls this possibility “not certain, but more than a suspicion.”
She notes: “I would be very surprised if we did not have a consistent approach that mirrors the EU in this regard, both in terms of perhaps even setting up our own internal industry to recycle or working cross-border with the rest of the world . Europe on it. And when you look at all the different reporting and disclosure standards coming into Britain, it will be useful to have a mechanism that records that sort of thing for batteries, like the EU regulation does.”
The complete conversation with Suriya Edwards is available on our sister site, Energy-Storage.new, with a Premium subscription.
