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 racing to bring everything from polluting natural gas turbines online to cleaner developments like solar farms and geothermal plants. Yet, despite these costly and complex efforts to expand generation capacity, gigawatts of power are already available for the taking across the U.S. economy. This untapped reservoir does not require building new power plants or laying miles of transmission lines; instead, it is hidden in plain sight as wasted energy from an unexpected source: electric motors.
Roughly 50 million electric motors drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually every factory, commercial warehouse, and large building in the United States. Together, these workhorses of the modern economy 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 industrial machinery and commercial infrastructure humming. Because they are typically designed to operate at a single constant speed regardless of actual facility needs, they draw maximum electrical current continuously, creating a massive, persistent drain on the electrical grid.
Companies can install specialized electronic controllers known as variable frequency drives, or VFDs, to make these motors run with extraordinary efficiency. Yet, despite the clear potential for massive energy and financial savings, adoption rates remain relatively low. This sluggish uptake is driven in part by the perceived hassle of retrofitting legacy equipment, the initial capital outlay, and the fact that these efficiency devices are typically not mandated by building codes or regulatory standards. 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, utility officials, and device manufacturers say there are now more compelling reasons than ever to equip the nation’s vast fleet of motors with these power-saving devices. They are increasingly urging federal agencies, utility providers, and deep-pocked technology giants to spur a much wider rollout of VFDs through a combination of targeted financial incentives and updated efficiency standards.
For one, sharply slashing the power consumed by electric motors would immediately free up critical grid capacity for large and rapidly growing electricity users, such as energy-hungry data centers and the burgeoning electric vehicle charging infrastructure. It would also help curb operating costs for factories that are actively switching from traditional fossil-fueled heating systems to electrified, motor-based solutions like industrial heat pumps—all at a time when industrial power prices are climbing fast across many regions of the country. Furthermore, modern VFD technology has become far more sophisticated, reliable, and significantly less expensive to install than earlier iterations that debuted decades ago.
"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 broad potential of the technology.
Energy-wise, the fundamental operational problem with standard electric motors is that they are almost always running at full capacity, much like driving a car with the gas pedal floored while using the brakes to control speed. Consider a large commercial office building, which largely empties out in the evening hours after employees depart for the day. While the heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning system can wind down during those quiet hours with dampers and valves restricting the flow of conditioned air, the heavy-duty motors and fans that drive the entire setup are often still working in the background at full tilt, needlessly wasting vast amounts of energy.
VFDs solve this inefficiency by acting as advanced electronic controllers equipped with temperature and pressure sensors that continually adjust the speed of motors in real time. By automatically ramping the motor speed up or down to precisely match real-time demand, the technology—which is also frequently referred to as adjustable speed drives—has the potential to curb an individual motor’s energy consumption by around 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 to staggering totals across large-scale industrial operations. Toyota, for example, installed VFDs on more than 200 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. 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 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.
Electric Motors in Nearly Every Factory
Certain historical aspects of the technology have held the drives back since they first debuted in the commercial market in the late 1960s. Measuring the precise flow of water, air, refrigerant, or whatever else is moving through the complex system that the motors are driving was for decades an expensive and complicated engineering process. Accurately controlling motors to deliver the exact right amount of electrical juice at precisely the right moment faced similar technical hurdles and reliability concerns.
But recent rapid advances in solid-state sensors and sophisticated machine-learning algorithms have significantly slashed both the cost and the operational complexity of utilizing modern drives, Elliott notes. Modern VFDs have also benefited enormously from the massive, global scaling and increased production of advanced power semiconductor chips, which are heavily utilized in high-voltage applications such as electric vehicles and solar power inverters.
Another long-standing challenge has been that commercial and industrial building developers frequently prioritize reducing upfront construction costs over netting long-term energy savings, and consequently do not always build to the highest possible efficiency levels, says 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," he explains. And if companies do not install advanced drives from the very beginning of a building’s lifecycle, they are likely far less inclined to take the time, spend the capital, and disrupt operations to retrofit an operating system later.
The trade association recently launched a collaborative pilot program with equipment manufacturers, regional utilities, and energy-efficiency advocacy groups to collect robust, real-world data about how VFDs effectively reduce motors’ electricity consumption and lower utility bills. The explicit goal of the initiative is to demonstrate empirically how the technology can benefit not only individual industrial and commercial facilities but also the wider electrical grid—thereby providing utilities with a concrete, data-driven reason to provide generous financial rebates for industrial customers.
VFDs Slash Motors’ Electricity Use
Proponents say they hope the empirical results will help the U.S. Department of Energy shape future efficiency measures and financial incentives that encourage much wider adoption of the drives, including within federally owned and operated buildings. Despite political shifts and open skepticism toward home appliance and equipment efficiency mandates from some administrations, agency staff have apparently remained receptive to discussing pragmatic solutions that could successfully meet the soaring power needs of the nation’s rapidly expanding data center footprint.
"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 floated the intriguing idea of having wealthy technology companies help subsidize factory owners and commercial landlords to install VFDs in order to free up essential room on constrained regional grids. After all, major hyperscale tech companies 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 supercharge the buildout of new gas turbines and power plants.
"Instead of ‘bring your own power,’ it should be ‘offset your own power,’" he says, referring to a growing regulatory effort by various states to compel data centers to secure their own independent power resources and prevent rising electricity costs for residential and regular commercial 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 steadily gained some momentum in recent years among factories and large commercial buildings as rising electricity costs and other grid-wide reliability challenges make it increasingly difficult to justify wasting energy.
Still, "it hasn’t permeated enough to get everyone utilizing it," he notes. "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."
