Aiming at the throttling loss and energy waste caused by frequent lifting and braking of gantry system and driving system of electric forklift in its working cycle, a combined energy recovery method based on working characteristics was proposed. On the basis of analyzing the typical working process of forklift, a combined recovery scheme of potential energy and braking energy of electric forklift with super capacitor as energy storage device was proposed, and the fuzzy PID adaptive control method was introduced to realize the accurate control of the displacement of hydraulic cylinder by the electro-hydraulic position servo system; aiming at the proposed scheme and control method, the simulation model of potential energy and kinetic energy joint recovery of electric forklift was established by using AMESim and Simulink software. Finally, the proposed method and simulation model were used to analyze the energy recovery of a working cycle of an electric forklift truck in a warehouse. The results show that the proposed method has a significant effect on the combined recovery of potential energy and brake energy, the range and energy efficiency of the electric forklift truck are improved.