- SK On says solid-state cells can give industrial robots the 8+ hour runtime of a human shift, but adoption could be another story
- While upcoming solid-state batteries increase productivity through longer run times and lower overall operating costs, they are prohibitively more expensive than some of their lithium-ion peers.
- Modern Li-on-based batteries account for less than 2% of the manufacturing cost of a robot today, and solid-state ones would raise that proportion to around 8%, a premium that could carry serious trade-offs for manufacturers.
Modern robotics is a field that continues to grow over time, driven by a combination of smarter artificial intelligence, manufacturing efficiencies, and sometimes better materials that change what is possible on the ground.
However, robots currently used in factories and warehouses have a key limitation that has not yet been adequately addressed: lithium-ion batteries often cannot meet the power demand that modern robots have.
This is particularly reflected in the frequency with which they require a battery change or recharging: most lithium-ion-powered robots typically run for one to two hours on a charge, a far cry from the industry’s ambitions for machines that can work a full eight-hour shift.
An expensive solution to current robot battery limits
Speaking at the 2nd Battery Foundry Forum in Seoul on July 15, 2026, Ko Young-seok, executive vice president and head of product planning at Korean battery maker SK On, argued that solid-state cells can offer significant value to industrial robots that require long runtime.
He also explained that if manufacturers actually adopt them it will reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO), compared to two cheaper rival approaches: battery swapping and ultra-fast charging.
The TCO framework implies that solid-state batteries, the battery industry’s most hyped next-generation technology and inherently expensive to boot, could appeal to industrial buyers simply because the math works in their favor relative to conventional Li-ion configurations.
This is because the cost of maintaining spare battery packs, charging and/or swapping times, and potentially additional robots to cover the resulting downtime must be factored in, which could leave solid state with a lower TCO than the competition despite the higher sticker price.
Framing may also be inevitable given the way batteries are found in a robot’s bill of materials today. A lithium-ion battery represents less than 2% of the total cost of an industrial robot, according to SK On, which is essentially a rounding error in the grand scheme of things, but switching to a solid-state battery could bring that ratio to around 8%, a significant jump in overall costs.
To put that in context, a widely reported teardown of Tesla’s Optimus Gen 2 puts the battery pack at about $300 on a hardware cost structure of about $55,000, about 0.5% of the bill of materials, comfortably under 2%, although units with larger packs or lower overall costs would cost more, and some independent estimates, including McKinsey, put the battery modules at 5 to 10%. from the bill of materials of a humanoid.
Solid-state cells, with their higher energy density, are one of the most promising routes toward a robot that performs a human shift non-stop, but given their comparatively high cost versus the competition, one can understand why SK On is aiming this pitch at industrial and robotics players who need the technology and can afford it.
For applications with short duty cycles, switching to a cheap lithium-ion pack or fast charging between tasks may still simply be the best economic answer, but for customers who want and can pay for more sustained power, solid state appears to be the new choice, even if it remains elusive for commercial electric vehicles given its cost.
SK On appears in this game in a specific timeline. The company last September completed its all-solid-state pilot plant at its Future Technology Institute in Daejeon, built in partnership with US solid electrolyte firm Solid Power.
It is developing two chemistries: a polymer oxide composite cell to be commercialized in 2028 and a sulfur-based cell in 2029, a timeline it has already accelerated by a year. But it has competition waiting in the wings: Rival Samsung SDI, working with the same American partner, is targeting 2027.
It remains to be seen whether this will lead to widespread adoption of technology that is expected to appear only in the most expensive EVs on the market this decade, but the TCO argument Ko makes could more easily apply to industrial customers than to consumer EV buyers, for whom pricing and budgets are key factors.
Through The ELEC
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