America’s energy supply crunch is driving a massive surge of federal and private investment in new electricity generation, spanning everything from traditional, polluting gas turbines to cleaner, forward-looking developments like solar farms and advanced geothermal plants. Yet, despite the widespread focus on bringing new generation online, gigawatts of power are already available for the taking right across the U.S. economy. This untapped capacity comes in the form of wasted energy from an unexpected 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, these industrial workhorses gobble up enough electricity to equal nearly a third of total U.S. power demand. Too often, however, these motors use far more energy than they actually need to keep America’s machines humming, running inefficiently in the background while burning through power resources that the strained electrical grid can ill afford to waste.
Companies have the option to install specialized hardware known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, to make these motors run with exceptional efficiency. Yet, adoption rates remain relatively low across the industrial and commercial sectors. This sluggish uptake is driven in part by the perceived hassle of retrofitting legacy equipment and the reality that these components are typically not mandated by building codes. On average, only 16 percent of motor systems at industrial facilities and a mere 4 percent of commercial-sector motors utilize VFDs, according to a comprehensive 2021 market report published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
However, energy experts and device manufacturers argue that there are now more compelling reasons than ever to equip the nation’s vast fleet of motors with these power-saving devices. They are urging federal agencies, utility providers, and deep-pocked technology giants to spearhead a wider rollout of VFDs through targeted financial incentives and modernized efficiency standards.
Proponents point out that slashing motors’ power consumption would instantly free up critical grid capacity for large and rapidly growing electricity users, such as energy-hungry data centers and the burgeoning electric vehicle market. Furthermore, it would help curb soaring operating costs for factories that are actively transitioning away from fossil-fueled heating systems toward electrified, motor-based solutions like industrial heat pumps—all at a time when commercial and industrial power prices are climbing at an alarming rate. Compounding these benefits, modern VFD technology has also become far more sophisticated, reliable, and significantly 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 about the practical advantages of the technology.
From an energy management perspective, the fundamental problem with electric motors is that they are traditionally designed to run at full capacity all the time, regardless of real-time operational needs. Consider a typical large office building, which empties out almost entirely in 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 ducts. Yet, the heavy-duty motors and large fans that drive the entire setup are often still working away in the background at maximum speed, churning air against closed barriers and wasting vast amounts of energy.
VFDs solve this systemic inefficiency by acting as advanced electronic controllers equipped with precise temperature and pressure sensors. These devices continually monitor system conditions and automatically adjust the speed of electric motors, ramping them up or down to match real-time operational demand. This technology, which is also frequently referred to in the industry as adjustable speed drives, has 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.
The cumulative energy reductions made possible by these devices can quickly add up to substantial financial and environmental savings for large enterprises. For instance, manufacturing giant Toyota installed VFDs on more than 200 individual motors inside the HVAC system at its massive auto manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky. The deployment was part of a $1.25 million pilot project launched in 2015. As a direct result of the upgrades, the automaker saved more than $700,000 in annual electricity costs alone, and the company confirmed via email that it continues to utilize the technology across its other manufacturing facilities throughout the United States.
“We’ve known for many, many years that there’s a huge opportunity for energy savings by varying the speed of the motor,” Elliott says, noting with a touch of irony that he literally wrote the definitive book on energy-efficient motor systems back in 2002.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
Despite the clear financial and operational benefits, certain technical and structural aspects of the technology have historically held drives back since they first debuted in the commercial market in the late 1960s. For decades, accurately measuring the flow of water, air, refrigerant—or whatever medium was moving through the complex systems driven by these motors—was an expensive and challenging engineering process. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the exact amount of mechanical energy required at any given moment faced similar technical hurdles and high initial costs.
In recent years, however, rapid technological advances in solid-state sensors and machine-learning algorithms have significantly slashed both the cost and the complexity of deploying variable frequency drives, Elliott points out. Modern VFDs have also benefited enormously from the massive, global scaling of advanced power semiconductor chips. These same high-performance chips are heavily utilized in other booming high-voltage applications, such as electric vehicles and solar power inverters, driving down component costs across the board.
Another long-standing hurdle has been the split incentive structure inherent in commercial and industrial real estate development. Developers often prioritize minimizing up-front construction costs over netting long-term energy savings for future tenants, meaning they do not always build facilities to the highest possible efficiency standards, explains Zack Valdez, senior director of regulatory and industry affairs at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, whose diverse membership includes 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. He adds that if companies fail to install advanced drives from the very beginning of a building’s lifecycle, they are substantially less inclined to take the time, incur the downtime, and spend the capital required to retrofit an already operational system.
To combat this inertia, the trade association recently launched a collaborative pilot program involving equipment manufacturers, utility companies, and energy-efficiency advocacy groups. The initiative is designed to collect rigorous, real-world data demonstrating precisely how VFDs reduce motors’ electricity consumption and lower commercial utility bills. The ultimate goal is to provide concrete, empirical evidence of how the technology can benefit not only individual industrial facilities but also the wider electrical grid, giving utility providers a compelling reason to offer generous financial rebates to industrial and commercial customers.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents of the technology say they hope the results of these data-gathering efforts will help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency standards and financial incentives that encourage the widespread adoption of drives, including in federally owned buildings and facilities. Even amid shifting political landscapes and historical resistance to federal equipment mandates within certain administrations, agency staff have reportedly been receptive to discussing practical solutions that could help meet the soaring, near-insatiable power demands 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, a global manufacturing giant that produces VFDs domestically at a facility near Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
Anderson even floated the provocative idea of having wealthy technology companies help subsidize the cost for factory owners and commercial landlords to install VFDs, thereby freeing up vital room on constrained regional power grids. After all, major hyperscale cloud and AI operators are already spending many billions of dollars of their own capital to revive shuttered nuclear power plants, support next-generation geothermal energy projects, deploy massive fleets of grid-scale battery storage, and accelerate the buildout of new gas turbines and power plants.
“Instead of ‘bring your own power,’ it should be ‘offset your own power,’” Anderson says, referencing a growing regulatory push by state authorities to compel data centers to secure their own dedicated power resources and prevent utility cost spikes for regular residential and commercial ratepayers.
Michael Reckamp, director of enterprise strategy for Danfoss Drives North America, another prominent VFD manufacturer, noted that despite traditionally sluggish adoption rates, the technology has steadily gained momentum in recent years. Factories and large commercial building operators are increasingly turning to drives as rising electricity costs and broader grid-scale reliability challenges make it progressively harder to justify business-as-usual energy waste.
Still, adoption has not reached saturation point across the entire economy. “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.”
