ARC Current

On 10 September 2026, four pieces of second-life battery storage news landed on the same day. In Korea, a five-company consortium led by Hyundai Motor and Kia announced a pilot built around a 200kWh storage system assembled from used electric vehicle packs. The same day, Energy Storage News gathered progress reports from three second-life storage companies abroad into a single article. Read side by side, the four are not a ranking. Each sits at a different stage, and each is working through a different business structure at that stage. ...

A common shorthand among Korean ESS businesses goes like this: cells and modules are certified under KC 62619, and the complete ESS is certified under “KC 62933.” If that were right, anyone building an ESS from used batteries would face an immediate question — after clearing KC 10031, does the repurposed system have to go through KC 62933 as well, or does KC 10031 stand in for it? This piece checks the premise before answering. The short version: in the editions of the safety act’s standards list that we checked, there is no safety standard numbered KC 62933; the number 62933 is in use as a Korean Industrial Standard (KS). The next section spells out which editions were checked. From there, the piece sorts out where an ESS business actually runs into each standard, and how KC 10031 meets the installation rules when the batteries are second-life. ...

The Korean Agency for Technology and Standards (KATS) publishes its own record of who’s been designated as a reused-battery safety inspection body under KC 10031, and that record shows designations landing every single year since the regime took effect in October 2023 — 16 bodies confirmed as of May 2026. Year by year: 4 in 2023, 6 in 2024, 4 in 2025, and 2 so far in 2026 through May. Within that count, though, the number of bodies cleared to inspect repurposed battery systems — not just modules — has sat at four for over two years, unchanged since June 2024. ...

Most writing on used EV batteries assumes the reader already knows what “remanufacturing,” “reuse,” “recycling,” “safety certification,” “safety confirmation,” and “safety inspection” mean — and treats them as roughly interchangeable. They aren’t. Call a battery’s fate “reuse” and it enters the KC 10031 track. Call the same battery “remanufacturing” and it moves into the Motor Vehicle Management Act track instead. The word choice isn’t stylistic — it determines which law, which ministry, and which certification procedure applies. This piece is built to be looked up rather than read start to finish: a short entry for each term, with the law or standard it connects to. Where ARC Current has already covered a term in depth, the entry links there. ...

Two European rules are about to make a car’s battery State of Health (SOH) something manufacturers and sellers can no longer keep to themselves. The Battery Passport becomes mandatory from 18 February 2027 for electric-vehicle batteries, batteries for light means of transport such as e-bikes, and industrial batteries above 2 kWh placed on the EU market. A European Commission guidance document, published 28 July 2026 and updated 15 August, lays out 71 data points across battery categories, each marked mandatory, optional, or conditional. Around the same time, Euro 7 (Regulation (EU) 2024/1257) sets minimum battery durability thresholds for new vehicle types and requires that the underlying SOH be made available to the owner through an in-vehicle monitor. New-type approvals must comply from 29 November 2026; registration of previously approved types that don’t meet the requirement is barred from 29 November 2027. ...

The Certification Path for Remanufactured Batteries covered Korea’s pre-removal performance evaluation system, which grades retired EV batteries on three axes — performance, safety, and history — and sorts them into remanufacturing, reuse, or recycling. The performance axis is, in substance, remaining capacity: State of Health (SOH). Which grade a battery lands in decides whether it goes back into a car, into a second-life application like ESS, or back to raw material recovery. Even while the detailed grading criteria remain unwritten in subordinate legislation, the technical foundation underneath that grading — how SOH is actually measured — is worth laying out now. This piece covers what SOH means, what families of estimation methods exist, and why accuracy figures from lab studies on new cells don’t carry over cleanly to the field. ...

Nobody working on an EV’s high-voltage pack can confirm safety by looking at it. A connector that appears seated, or a cover that appears closed, tells you nothing about whether hundreds of volts are actually live behind it. HVIL — the High Voltage Interlock Loop — exists to take that judgment away from the person and hand it to a circuit. It matters most to whoever designs a retired-battery removal or remanufacturing process, because every step of handling that battery assumes this circuit is doing its job as designed. This piece covers what HVIL is and how it works, why high-voltage systems require it, how it’s physically built into packs and connectors, and what it means once a battery leaves the vehicle for remanufacturing. ...

An amendment to Korea’s Motor Vehicle Management Act will govern how retired EV batteries get turned into remanufactured ones — but Act No. 21412, promulgated February 27, 2026, is not in force yet. It takes effect July 1, 2027, still nearly a year off as of this writing. In What to Check When Planning a Second-Life Battery Business in Korea, ARC Current noted that when a battery’s path leads back to its original use — remanufacturing — neither KC 62619 nor KC 10031 applies, and left the actual remanufacturing path for a later piece. This is that piece. Because it deals with a law that hasn’t taken effect, this piece draws a hard line, sentence by sentence, between what the amendment settles now and what it hands off to lower-level rules still to be written. ...

K-BATTERY SHOW 2026, a Korean battery industry trade show held August 19–22, gave two startups their first real public exposure. Thot showed a robot called “Dismantlebot” built to automate the disassembly of retired EV batteries. Barkroad showed a battery pack reconfigured from retired cells and a modular power system built around it. Both companies showed these products at the event, so what follows keeps a hard line between what was demonstrated on the floor and what each company said about it. Performance figures and cost claims that can’t be independently checked are left out entirely. ...

Anyone drafting a business plan around used batteries in Korea runs into a problem that has less to do with a lack of information than with where that information sits. Where can the batteries be sourced, what application can that supply support, which certification track that application requires, what equipment and traceability the track demands, and what registration and insurance a business needs to operate — none of this lives in a single procedure. It is split across several laws under different ministries. This blog has already covered three of those pieces separately: which applications second-life batteries actually fit, what KC 62619 certification covers, and how the KC 10031 safety inspection works. This piece strings those three together in the order a business review actually has to follow, where the answer at each step decides the fork in the next one. ...