It had been in the works for a while, but now it has formally been adopted. From the article:
The regulation provides that by 2027 portable batteries incorporated into appliances should be removable and replaceable by the end-user, leaving sufficient time for operators to adapt the design of their products to this requirement.
There are lots of ideas like this when you don’t consider the battery certification process and the tons of safety standards. A stand alone battery like this requires it’s own housing (needs to be thick so you can’t crush the soft battery), certified connector for measuring it’s temperature and getting power out, include it’s PCM circuitry and be perfectly safe for whenever a customer might accidentally do to it. It’s far from from trivial. I do this for a living.
Honest question: is this different than the standards for things with non-removable batteries?
Same standards, and some extras depending on how you do it, but now the burden is on a small accessory part (the removable battery) instead of the complete system. The biggest hurdle here is the EU say it needs to be tool free and done by the customer. That’s a tremendous hurdle. Even today with cell phones that are considered repairable they require tools and don’t meet this bar.