This article was originally published by Canary Media.
America’s escalating energy supply crunch is driving a massive surge of federal and private investment in new electricity generation sources. Across the country, developers are rushing to bring everything from polluting gas turbines online to cleaner alternatives like solar farms and advanced geothermal plants. But even as billions of dollars are poured into constructing new power plants, gigawatts of usable electricity are already available for the taking across the U.S. economy, hiding in plain sight in the form of wasted energy from an unexpected source: electric motors.
Roughly 50 million electric motors drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually every factory, warehouse, and commercial building in the United States. Together, this sprawling fleet of machinery gobbles up enough electricity to equal nearly a third of the nation’s total power demand. In many cases, these motors consume far more energy than they actually need to keep America’s industrial lines humming and office buildings climate-controlled.
To curb this immense waste, companies can install specialized electronic controllers known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, which allow motors to run with exceptional efficiency. Yet, adoption of the technology remains relatively low across the commercial and industrial landscapes. This sluggish uptake is driven in part by the perceived hassle of retrofitting existing machinery and the reality that these components are typically not mandated by strict 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 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 motors with these power-saving devices. Industry stakeholders are increasingly urging federal agencies, electric 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 for rapidly growing electricity users, such as energy-hungry data centers and the expanding electric vehicle charging network. Furthermore, widespread adoption would help curb soaring overhead 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 industrial power prices are climbing at an alarming pace. Compounding these benefits, modern VFD technology has become vastly more sophisticated, reliable, and significantly less expensive to purchase and install than earlier iterations from decades past.
Nik Sawe, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan think tank Energy Innovation, describes the technology in straightforward terms, noting that it represents low-hanging fruit that can return a substantial amount of energy to the grid through reasonably simple means.
To understand the scale of the problem, one must examine how electric motors traditionally operate. From an energy perspective, the fundamental flaw of standard electric motors is that they are almost always running at full capacity, regardless of actual operational demand. Consider a typical large office building, which largely empties out in the evening hours. The heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system can naturally wind down during those quiet hours, with mechanical dampers and internal valves restricting the flow of hot or cold air through the ducts. However, the heavy-duty motors and powerful fans that drive the entire HVAC setup are often still working away in the background at maximum speed, needlessly wasting vast amounts of electricity.
VFDs solve this 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 the motors, ramping them up or down in real time to precisely match current demand. The technology, which is also frequently referred to in the industry as adjustable speed drives, has the remarkable potential to slash a motor’s total 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 drives can be staggering for large corporate operators. Toyota, for instance, 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 back in 2015. Thanks to the dramatic efficiency gains provided by the VFDs, the automaker saved more than $700,000 in annual electricity costs. The company confirmed by email that it continues to rely on the technology at other manufacturing facilities across the United States.
Elliott notes that the engineering community has understood the massive potential of varying motor speeds for many years, joking that he literally wrote the book on energy-efficient motor systems back in 2002.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
Despite the clear benefits, certain technical and structural aspects of the technology have historically held drives back since they first debuted in the late 1960s. For decades, accurately measuring the flow of water, air, refrigerant, or whatever medium was moving through the system driven by the motors was an expensive and complex engineering process. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the precise amount of juice at just the right split-second faced similar hurdles in early analog iterations.
However, recent technological leaps in advanced sensors and machine-learning algorithms have significantly slashed both the cost and the operational complexity of utilizing modern drives, Elliott explains. Furthermore, contemporary VFDs have benefited immensely from the massive scale of manufacturing for advanced power semiconductors, which are widely produced for high-voltage applications such as electric vehicles and utility-scale solar power inverters.
Another long-standing challenge has been the mindset of commercial and industrial building developers, who frequently prioritize minimizing up-front construction costs over netting long-term energy savings. Because of this financial focus, developers do not always build facilities to the highest possible efficiency levels, according to Zack Valdez, senior director of regulatory and industry affairs at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, whose diverse membership includes major drive and motor manufacturers.
Valdez points out that if a facility’s initial design specifications do not legally require high-efficiency components, people will often overlook VFDs entirely simply because they are trying to construct a building to meet bare-minimum energy requirements. Moreover, if companies fail to install drives from the very beginning during construction, they are significantly less inclined to invest the time and capital required to retrofit an already operational system later on.
To combat this inertia, the trade association recently launched a collaborative pilot program involving equipment manufacturers, local utilities, and energy-efficiency advocacy groups. The initiative is designed to gather concrete, real-world data demonstrating how VFDs effectively reduce motor electricity consumption and lower monthly utility bills. The ultimate goal is to clearly demonstrate how the technology benefits not just individual industrial facilities, but the wider electrical grid as well—thereby giving utilities a compelling, data-driven reason to provide financial rebates to industrial customers who install them.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents of the technology say they hope the results of these ongoing initiatives will help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency standards and financial incentives that encourage broader adoption of drives, including within federally owned buildings. Despite the incoming Trump administration’s historical skepticism toward federal appliance and equipment mandates, agency staff have reportedly remained open to discussing practical solutions that could help meet the soaring, near-insatiable power demands of modern data centers.
Kirk Anderson, director of government relations and public affairs for global manufacturing giant ABB—which manufactures VFDs domestically at a facility near Milwaukee—suggests the potential scale is immense. He notes that if a drive were added to every eligible motor currently operating across the country, the resulting energy savings could supply enough power to fuel up to five years of projected data center growth without requiring the construction of a single new power generation plant.
Anderson has floated innovative concepts, such as having major technology companies help subsidize the cost for factory owners to install VFDs in exchange for freeing up much-needed room on regional power grids. This approach comes at a time when hyperscale tech companies are already spending tens of billions of dollars to revive shuttered nuclear power plants, finance next-generation geothermal projects, deploy massive fleets of grid-scale batteries, and supercharge the local buildout of natural gas turbines and power stations.
Instead of pursuing a strategy where data centers are simply told to bring their own power, Anderson argues that the focus should shift toward offsetting power usage elsewhere in the system, referencing a growing trend among state regulators aiming to secure dedicated power resources for data centers while preventing rate hikes for regular residential and commercial utility customers.
Michael Reckamp, director of enterprise strategy for Danfoss Drives North America, another prominent VFD manufacturer, echoes these sentiments. He notes that despite traditionally low adoption rates, the technology has gradually gained meaningful momentum in recent years as rising electricity costs and broader grid-wide reliability challenges make it increasingly difficult for businesses to justify wasting energy.
Still, Reckamp emphasizes that the technology has not yet permeated the market deeply enough to get every eligible facility utilizing it. He concludes that given the current environment, marked by frequent grid stability issues, brownouts, and massive new loads from artificial intelligence and data centers, there should be a renewed and urgent focus on deploying drives to reduce mechanical stress on the grid and lock in lasting energy savings.
