America’s escalating energy supply crunch is driving a massive wave of federal and private investment in new electricity generation. From polluting gas turbines to cleaner developments like solar farms and geothermal plants, the race is on to feed a hungry grid. Yet, gigawatts of power are already available for the taking across the United States economy in the form of wasted energy from a surprisingly ordinary and ubiquitous source: electric motors.
Roughly 50 million electric motors drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually every factory, warehouse, and commercial building across the nation. Together, this vast fleet of machinery gobbles up enough electricity to equal nearly a third of total U.S. power demand. Too often, however, these motors operate on blunt settings, using far more energy than they actually need to keep America’s industrial machinery and commercial building systems humming.
Companies can install specialized electrical devices known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, to make these motors run with exceptional efficiency. Yet, adoption remains relatively low across the broader economy. This sluggish uptake is driven in part by the perceived hassle of retrofitting existing equipment and the fact that these efficiency boosters are typically not mandated by building codes or industrial regulations. On average, only 16 percent of motor systems at industrial facilities and a meager 4 percent of commercial-sector motors utilize VFDs, according to a 2021 market report published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
However, energy experts and device manufacturers say there are now more compelling reasons than ever to equip the nation’s motors with these power-saving devices. They are increasingly urging federal agencies, utility providers, and deep-pocked tech giants to spur a much wider rollout of VFDs through targeted financial incentives, attractive rebates, and updated efficiency standards.
Slashing motors’ power consumption would instantly free up crucial grid capacity for surging, large-scale electricity users like artificial intelligence data centers and the growing fleet of electric vehicles. Furthermore, it would help curb soaring operational costs for factories that are actively transitioning away from fossil-fueled heating systems toward electrified, motor-based solutions such as industrial heat pumps—all at a time when industrial electricity prices are climbing at an alarming pace. Compounding these advantages, VFD technology has matured significantly, becoming far more sophisticated and considerably less expensive to install than earlier iterations from decades past.
"This is low-hanging fruit that gives a lot of energy back and is reasonably simple," says Nik Sawe, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, speaking of the technology’s untapped potential.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
The fundamental energy-efficiency problem with standard electric motors is that they are historically designed to run at full capacity all the time, regardless of real-time operational needs. Consider a typical commercial office building, which largely empties out during the evening hours. The heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system can easily wind down during those quiet hours, with physical dampers and valves restricting the flow of hot or cold air through the ductwork. Despite this reduced demand for conditioned air, the massive electric motors and fans that drive the entire setup continue working in the background at full speed, pointlessly squandering electricity.
VFDs solve this mismatch by acting as advanced electronic controllers equipped with temperature and pressure sensors that continually adjust the speed of motors. They automatically ramp speed up or down to precisely match real-time operational demand. This technology, which is also frequently referred to in the industry as adjustable speed drives, possesses the remarkable potential to curb a motor’s energy consumption by roughly 40 to 60 percent, according to Neal Elliott, director emeritus of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
All those individual energy reductions add up rapidly across large-scale operations. Industrial giant Toyota, for instance, installed VFDs on more than 200 electric motors inside the massive HVAC system at its automotive manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, as part of a $1.25 million pilot project launched in 2015. The automaker successfully saved more than $700,000 in annual electricity costs thanks entirely to the newly installed VFDs, and the company continues to utilize the technology at other manufacturing facilities across the United States, representatives confirmed by email.
"We’ve known for many, many years that there’s a huge opportunity for energy savings by varying the speed of the motor," says Elliott, who noted that he literally wrote the book on energy-efficient motor systems back in 2002.
Despite these clear financial and environmental benefits, certain technical and market hurdles have historically held the drives back since they first debuted on the commercial market in the late 1960s. For decades, accurately measuring the flow of water, air, refrigerant, or whatever medium was moving through the industrial systems driven by these motors remained an expensive and complex engineering process. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the exact right amount of electrical juice, at precisely the right microsecond, faced similar technical bottlenecks.
However, recent exponential advances in digital sensors and machine-learning algorithms have significantly slashed both the cost and the operational complexity of deploying these drives, Elliott explains. Modern VFDs have also benefited enormously from the mass production of advanced semiconductor power chips that were originally engineered for high-voltage applications such as electric vehicles and solar power inverters.
Another long-standing commercial challenge has been that real estate developers and industrial facility builders frequently prioritize reducing up-front capital construction costs over netting long-term energy savings. Consequently, they do not always construct facilities to the highest possible efficiency standards, notes Zack Valdez, senior director of regulatory and industry affairs at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, whose member companies include major drive and motor manufacturers.
"If the facility that you’re putting it into doesn’t require it, then oftentimes people will overlook VFDs, because they’re just trying to build to a minimum set of energy requirements," Valdez says. And if companies do not install the drives from the very beginning during initial construction, they are typically far less inclined to take the time, spend the capital, and disrupt operations to retrofit an operating system later.
To combat this inertia, the trade association recently launched a collaborative pilot program involving manufacturers, utility companies, and energy-efficiency advocacy groups. The initiative aims to collect robust, real-world data demonstrating precisely how VFDs reduce motors’ electricity consumption and lower monthly utility bills. The ultimate goal is to prove how the technology can benefit not only individual manufacturing facilities and commercial buildings, but also the wider electrical grid—thereby giving utility providers a concrete, data-driven reason to offer generous financial rebates for industrial and commercial customers.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents say they hope the empirical results of these pilot programs will help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency standards and financial incentives that encourage the widespread adoption of drives, including within federally owned buildings and facilities. Despite the incoming political changes and past administration skepticism toward home appliance and equipment mandates, agency staff have reportedly been receptive to discussing practical technological solutions capable of meeting the soaring, insatiable power needs of modern data centers.
"If you added a drive to all the motors that are out there, you could provide power for up to five years of data center growth without having to build any new generation," says Kirk Anderson, director of government relations and public affairs for ABB. The global manufacturing giant produces VFDs domestically at facilities near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Anderson has even floated the innovative idea of having wealthy technology companies help subsidize factory owners and commercial landlords to install VFDs, thereby freeing up vital room on strained regional electric grids. After all, major hyperscale tech companies are already spending many billions of private dollars to revive shuttered nuclear power plants, support next-generation geothermal energy projects, deploy massive fleets of grid-scale battery storage, and supercharge the buildout of new gas turbines and power stations.
"Instead of ‘bring your own power,’ it should be ‘offset your own power,’" he says, referring to a growing regulatory effort by state officials to compel data centers to secure their own dedicated clean power resources and prevent rising electricity costs for everyday residential and small-business customers.
Michael Reckamp, director of enterprise strategy for Danfoss Drives North America, another major VFD manufacturer, echoes these sentiments. He notes that despite historically low adoption rates, the technology has steadily gained vital momentum in recent years among factories and commercial buildings as rising electricity costs and persistent grid-wide challenges make it increasingly difficult to justify ongoing energy waste.
Still, "it hasn’t permeated enough to get everyone utilizing it," Reckamp says. "In the current situation, where we’re having so many issues with grids, brownouts, and now data centers wanting to take the load, I think there should be a renewed focus on putting drives out there to really reduce the stress on the grid and improve energy savings."
