The Chinese Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) have seemingly decided the future of all powerbanks manufactured in country. Moving forward, it will be mandatory for all powerbanks to have built-in LCD display, or an app that allows officials to check the status and security of the powerbank.
According to ITHome (Google Translate required if you can’t read Chinese), China’s MIIT came to the decision to have this new ruling in place. Not only that, but if all goes according to plan, then these new requirements will effectively render the current requirement that all powerbanks have “CCC” certification completely invalid.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the past year, let’s catch you up: Due to an increased frequency of powerbanks exploding on board planes mid-flight, China instated the current ruling that all powerbanks without a CCC certification are banned from planes. Initially limited to domestic flights, the country’s aviation authorities seem to have expanded the ban on all flights coming in and going out of the country.
Unsurprisingly, it didn’t take long before a series of spontaneously combusting powerbanks on non-Chinese flights began popping up, resulting in nearly all major airlines instating similar rules on the plane. Having said that, this is a somewhat difficult ruling to enforce: it’s one thing to call out one or two passengers for being errant, but it’s an entirely different animal when half or more of the passengers onboard are flouting it.
There will, unsurprisingly, be a drawback with this new ruling. The MIIT believes that when it implements this new ruling, it expects at least 70% of the country’s powerbank manufacturers to withdraw from the market, simply because they would be unable to meet the technical requirement of the new standards. Nevertheless, the Chinese government body is standing its ground with a simple message: if you can’t meet the standards, don’t continue production, because there will always be some companies that can meet them.
Other requirements by the MIIT include a new standard that introduces several enhanced safety tests, such as – we’re using the rough translation here at this point – battery piercing tests, temperature tests, and even overcharging tests. Little worry for some brands then; Anker already manufactures powerbanks with interactive displays, as does Cuktech, whose powerbanks provide detailed information about the flow of power from its source to devices.
(Source: ITHome)
