America’s escalating energy supply crunch has triggered a massive wave of federal and private investment aimed at bringing new electricity generation online. Across the country, developers are racing to build everything from polluting gas turbines to cleaner, renewable installations like solar farms and geothermal plants. Yet, energy experts point out that a massive reserve of gigawatts is already available for the taking across the U.S. economy, hiding in plain sight within an unexpected source: electric motors.
Roughly 50 million electric motors drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually every factory, commercial facility, and large building in the United States. Together, these industrial workhorses consume enough electricity to equal nearly a third of total U.S. power demand. Too often, however, these motors operate inefficiently, drawing far more energy than they actually need to keep the nation’s machinery humming.
Companies can install specialized electronic devices known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, to make these motors run with exceptional efficiency. Yet, market adoption remains relatively low. This slow uptake is driven partly by the perceived hassle of retrofitting existing industrial equipment and partly by the fact that the technology is rarely mandated by building codes or regulatory agencies. 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 2005-and-beyond market assessment by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
However, energy experts and device manufacturers argue that there are now more pressing 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-pocketed tech giants to spearhead a wider rollout of VFDs through targeted financial incentives and modernized efficiency standards.
Advocates point out that slashing the power consumption of electric motors would instantly free up critical grid capacity for high-demand electricity users, such as rapidly expanding data centers and the growing fleet of electric vehicles. Furthermore, it would help curb soaring operating costs for factories that are actively transitioning away from fossil-fueled heating systems and toward electrified, motor-based solutions like heat pumps—all at a time when industrial power prices are climbing rapidly nationwide. Additionally, modern VFD technology has evolved to become far more sophisticated, reliable, and significantly less expensive to install than its earlier iterations.
"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, describing the untapped potential of the technology.
From an energy standpoint, the fundamental 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 office building, which empties out entirely in the evening hours. While the building’s heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system can wind down during those quiet hours with dampers and valves restricting the flow of hot or cold air, the massive motors and fans driving the entire infrastructure continue working unabated in the background, wasting massive amounts of electricity.
VFDs solve this inefficiency by functioning as advanced electronic controllers equipped with temperature and pressure sensors that continually adjust the rotational speed of motors. By automatically ramping speeds up or down to match real-time operational demand, the technology—often referred to interchangeably as adjustable speed drives—has the capacity to slash a motor’s energy use by roughly 40 to 60 percent, according to Neal Elliott, director emeritus of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.
The cumulative effect of these energy reductions can be staggering for large industrial operators. Toyota, for instance, installed VFDs on more than 200 motors within the HVAC system at its massive 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 to the deployment of the VFDs, and the company continues to utilize the technology across other manufacturing facilities throughout the United States, representatives confirmed via 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 authored the defining textbook on energy-efficient motor systems back in 2002.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
Despite the clear financial and environmental benefits, certain technical limitations have historically held VFDs 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 industrial systems driven by these motors remained an expensive and complex engineering challenge. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the precise amount of electrical power at the exact right moment faced similar technological hurdles.
Recent breakthroughs in sensor manufacturing and machine-learning algorithms, however, have significantly slashed both the cost and the complexity of deploying modern drives, Elliott explains. Furthermore, contemporary VFDs have benefited immensely from the broader, global scaling of advanced power semiconductors and chips used in high-voltage applications such as electric vehicles and utility-scale solar power inverters.
Another long-standing hurdle has been the real estate and construction mindset. Commercial and industrial building developers frequently prioritize minimizing upfront capital expenses over realizing long-term energy savings, leading them to construct facilities that barely meet baseline efficiency standards, says Zack Valdez, senior director of regulatory and industry affairs at the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, whose membership includes leading 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 explains. He adds that if companies fail to install drives from the very beginning of a building’s lifecycle, they are substantially less inclined to invest the time and capital required to retrofit an operating system later.
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 how VFDs effectively reduce motor electricity consumption and lower commercial utility bills. The ultimate objective is to provide concrete, empirical proof of how the technology benefits not just individual facilities, but the wider electrical grid as well—thereby giving utility providers a compelling reason to offer generous financial rebates to their industrial customers.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents say they hope these findings will help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency measures and incentive structures that encourage widespread adoption of VFDs, including within federally owned and operated buildings. Even amid political skepticism toward federal home appliance and equipment mandates, agency staff have reportedly proven receptive to discussing practical solutions capable of meeting the voracious 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 has floated the provocative idea of having major technology companies help subsidize the cost for factory owners to install VFDs, creating a direct mechanism to free up capacity on constrained regional grids. After all, major tech hyperscalers are already spending tens of billions of dollars to revive shuttered nuclear power plants, support next-generation geothermal energy projects, deploy massive fleets of grid-scale batteries, and accelerate the build-out of new gas turbines and power plants to fuel the artificial intelligence boom.
"Instead of ‘bring your own power,’ it should be ‘offset your own power,’" Anderson says, referencing a growing regulatory effort by state officials to compel data centers to secure their own dedicated power resources and prevent surging electricity costs for everyday residential and commercial ratepayers.
Michael Reckamp, director of enterprise strategy for Danfoss Drives North America, another major VFD manufacturer, echoes the sentiment that momentum is shifting. He notes that despite traditionally low adoption rates, the technology has gained considerable traction in recent years among factory operators and building managers as rising electricity costs and broader grid-wide instability make it increasingly difficult to justify wasting power.
Still, the technology has not yet achieved universal saturation. "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."
