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 constructing brand-new power generation facilities, staggering amounts of gigawatts are already available for the taking across the United States economy. This hidden reserve does not require drilling new wells or paving over pristine land; instead, it exists in the form of wasted energy from an entirely unexpected source: electric motors.
Across the country, some 50 million electric motors quietly drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually every factory, warehouse, and commercial building. Together, these heavy-duty workhorses gobble up enough electricity to equal nearly a third of total U.S. power demand. Too often, however, these motors operate far less efficiently than they could, using significantly more energy than is actually required to keep America’s industrial machinery and commercial infrastructure humming along.
Companies have the option to install specialized electronic devices known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, to make these motors run with exceptional efficiency. Yet, despite the proven capability of the technology, adoption rates remain relatively low across the commercial and industrial sectors. This sluggish uptake is driven in part by the perceived hassle of retrofitting legacy equipment and the reality that such upgrades are typically not legally required by building codes or federal mandates. On average, only 16 percent of motor systems at industrial facilities and a mere 4 percent of commercial-sector motors currently utilize VFDs, according to a comprehensive 2005 market report updated in 2021 by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
However, energy experts, policy analysts, 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. Industry advocates are actively urging federal agencies, regional utilities, and deep-pocked tech giants to spur a much wider rollout of VFDs through a combination of targeted financial incentives and modernized efficiency standards.
Proponents point out that slashing the power consumption of existing motors would immediately free up valuable grid capacity to support rapidly expanding, high-demand electricity users such as 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 alternatives like industrial heat pumps—all during a period when industrial power prices are climbing at an alarming pace. Additionally, modern VFD technology has evolved to become far more sophisticated, reliable, and significantly less expensive to install than earlier iterations from decades past.
Nik Sawe, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, characterizes the technology in straightforward terms. It is low-hanging fruit that gives a substantial amount of energy back to the grid and is reasonably simple to implement, he notes.
The fundamental energy-efficiency problem with standard electric motors is that they are traditionally designed to run constantly at full capacity, regardless of actual operational needs. Consider a typical large office building, which largely empties out 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 cold or hot air through the ducts. Despite this reduction in actual air delivery, however, the heavy-duty motors and fans driving the entire ventilation setup often continue working at full blast in the background, needlessly churning electricity into waste heat and friction.
VFDs solve this inefficiency by acting as intelligent electronic controllers equipped with precise temperature and pressure sensors that continually adjust the speed of electric motors. Instead of running wide open all the time, the motor automatically ramps up or down to match real-time environmental demand. This technology, which is also frequently referred to as adjustable speed drives, has the remarkable potential to curb an individual 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 of those incremental energy reductions can add up to staggering savings for major enterprises. Toyota, for instance, installed variable frequency drives on more than 200 individual motors inside the HVAC system at its major auto manufacturing plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, as part of a $1.25 million pilot project launched in 2015. Thanks to the precise speed control provided by the VFDs, the automaker slashed more than $700,000 off its annual electricity costs. The company confirmed by email that it continues to successfully utilize the technology at various other manufacturing facilities across the United States.
Elliott notes that the industrial sector has long recognized the potential of this efficiency strategy. Industry professionals have known for many, many years that there is a huge opportunity for energy savings by varying the speed of the motor, he says, adding with a touch of irony that he literally wrote the book on energy-efficient motor systems back in 2002.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
Despite the clear financial and environmental benefits, certain technical and systemic aspects of the technology have historically held drives back since they first debuted in the late 1960s. For decades, accurately measuring the complex flow of water, air, refrigerant—whatever medium happened to be moving through the system that the motors were driving—was an expensive and intricate engineering process. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the exact right amount of juice at precisely the right operational moment faced similar technical hurdles.
In recent years, however, rapid advances in industrial sensors and sophisticated machine-learning algorithms have significantly slashed both the cost and the operational complexity of utilizing drives, Elliott explains. Modern VFDs have also benefited enormously from economies of scale driven by the increased global production of advanced power semiconductors. These same high-performance chips are heavily utilized in other high-voltage applications, such as electric vehicles and utility-scale solar power inverters.
Another long-standing challenge is that commercial and industrial building developers frequently prioritize reducing initial up-front construction costs over netting long-term energy savings. Consequently, they do not always build facilities to the highest possible efficiency levels, 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 are putting it into does not legally require it, then oftentimes people will overlook VFDs because they are just trying to build to a minimum set of energy requirements, Valdez says. Furthermore, if companies fail to install advanced drives from the very beginning of a building’s lifecycle, they are naturally much less inclined to take the time and expense to retrofit an actively operating mechanical system later on.
To address this barrier, the trade association recently launched a collaborative pilot program involving equipment manufacturers, regional utilities, and dedicated energy-efficiency groups. The primary objective is to collect concrete, real-world operational data demonstrating precisely how VFDs reduce motors’ electricity consumption and lower monthly utility bills. Organizers hope to clearly illustrate how the technology can benefit not only individual industrial facilities but also the wider electrical grid—thereby providing utilities with a concrete, data-driven reason to offer financial rebates for industrial customers who upgrade their equipment.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents of the technology say they hope the empirical results from these pilot programs will ultimately help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency measures and financial incentives. Such policies could encourage a much broader adoption of drives across the private sector, as well as in federally owned buildings. Despite the incoming Trump administration’s historical skepticism toward home appliance and equipment efficiency mandates, agency staff have apparently remained receptive to discussing practical solutions that could help meet the soaring, uninterrupted power needs of the nation’s rapidly expanding network of data centers.
If you added a drive to all the motors that are out there, you could provide enough freed-up capacity for up to five years of data center growth without having to build a single new power generation plant, 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 has even floated the innovative idea of having deep-pocked tech companies help subsidize the cost for factory owners to install VFDs, thereby freeing up vital room on congested regional grids. After all, major hyperscalers and cloud computing giants are already spending many billions of dollars on private energy initiatives—such as reviving shuttered nuclear power plants, supporting next-generation geothermal energy projects, deploying massive fleets of grid-scale batteries, and supercharging the buildout of new gas turbines and power stations.
Instead of a bring-your-own-power model, it should be an offset-your-own-power approach, Anderson says, referring to a growing regulatory effort by various state governments to compel data centers to secure their own dedicated clean power resources and prevent rising electricity costs for residential and small business customers.
Michael Reckamp, director of enterprise strategy for Danfoss Drives North America, another major VFD manufacturer, noted that despite traditionally low adoption rates, the technology has gradually gained noticeable momentum in recent years. Factories and commercial buildings are increasingly turning to VFDs as rising electricity costs, stringent corporate sustainability goals, and broader grid-wide reliability challenges make it harder to justify wasting energy.
Still, it hasn’t permeated enough to get everyone utilizing it, Reckamp cautions. In the current economic and operational situation, where we are having so many issues with aging grids, rolling brownouts, and now massive data centers wanting to take a huge share of the electrical load, I think there should be a renewed focus on putting drives out there to really reduce the stress on the grid and improve overall energy savings.
