Lithium-ion won the war against lead-acid in standard warehouse environments, but there is one sector where lithium still struggles: deep-freeze cold storage. When you take a standard lithium-ion forklift into a minus-20-degree Fahrenheit freezer, the electrolyte fluid inside the battery cells gets thick and sluggish. You lose about 30% of your capacity, and more importantly, you cannot fast-charge the battery in that environment without causing permanent, irreversible damage to the cells.
To get around this, cold-storage facilities usually have to run the forklifts out of the freezer into a staging area to charge them, wasting immense amounts of time and letting cold air escape the building. The industry is now seeing the first real-world deployments of solid-state battery packs in Class I and Class II forklifts to solve this exact problem. Because solid-state batteries use a solid ceramic or polymer electrolyte instead of a liquid one, they do not freeze, and they do not experience the severe internal resistance drops that lithium-ion does in the cold.
A forklift running a solid-state pack can operate at full power in a sub-zero environment and actually accept a fast charge while sitting inside the freezer. Furthermore, solid-state chemistry is inherently non-flammable. In a dense freezer warehouse where a thermal runaway fire would be nearly impossible to extinguish, that safety factor alone is enough to get the attention of risk-management departments. While the upfront cost of these solid-state packs is still brutally high, for massive logistics hubs running 24/7 frozen operations, the math is starting to make sense.
