Safety

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

The certification a business actually has to clear to repurpose a used battery for another application isn’t KC 62619. As the previous piece in this series, KC 62619 Explained: Scope, Procedure, and Where It Strains Against Used Batteries, laid out, KC 62619 was built around new industrial lithium cells, and that new-cell assumption strains against what a used battery actually is. Korea’s government filled that gap with a separate safety inspection regime, detailed under KC 10031. This piece covers what KC 10031 actually governs, how far its scope reaches, what an inspection under it involves, and where that creates friction for a business trying to repurpose used batteries. ...

Anyone putting lithium batteries into an ESS runs into KC 62619 first. Written for new industrial lithium cells, it also reads like the natural starting point for businesses trying to repurpose retired EV batteries. Apply it in practice, though, and clauses built around a new-cell assumption start to strain against what a used battery actually is. This piece lays out what KC 62619 covers, how certification under it actually runs, and where that strain shows up when the object in front of you is a used battery rather than a new one. The certification path for remanufacturing — putting a used battery back into its original role — belongs to the next piece in this series. ...

Korea’s supply of retired EV batteries is growing fast. According to the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, domestic volume reached 8,321 units in 2025 and is projected to hit 107,500 by 2030. That 2030 figure is still just a projection, though, and past forecasts have missed actual volume by a wide margin — a gap this piece revisits later as a supply-side variable. Ask where all of that can go, and the answer so far converges on one thing: energy storage systems (ESS). Anyone evaluating a second-life battery business wants to know why so few other uses have shown up, and whether that’s likely to change. Rather than listing applications, this piece starts from what actually changes inside a battery once it comes out of a car, and works forward from there. ...

A research team led by Professor Kim Ju-heon at Chung-Ang University’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Department of Intelligent Energy and Industry Convergence, with graduate researcher Kim Sang-woo, has developed a composite material that both slows the spread of heat inside lithium-ion batteries and absorbs the heat itself. The findings were published in Chemical Engineering Journal (impact factor 12.5). In a lithium-ion battery, excessive heat generated in one cell — from an internal short circuit, for instance — can spread rapidly to neighboring cells and trigger a chain reaction. That chain reaction, known as thermal runaway, is a leading cause of EV and energy storage system (ESS) fires. ...