ABB’s new report, The Industrial Efficiency Gap, shows how high-efficiency industrial motors and generators can unlock one of the largest untapped opportunities to save energy, cut costs and reduce emissions in global industry.
Motors rated above 375 kW account for an estimated 10.4% of global electricity demand today, a figure projected to double by 2040. The report examined a decade of data from ABB’s Västerås manufacturing facility in Sweden, which delivered more than 1,000 large synchronous motors and generators worldwide between 2015 and 2025. It found that a significant efficiency gap persists between what is routinely specified and what is achievable through ABB’s Top Industrial Efficiency (TIE) approach, which focuses on specifying the highest efficiency motor or generator using proven commercially available technology.
Applied across the global installed base of similar equipment, this 0.2% gap is costing operators between $9.5 billion to $12 billion in unnecessary electricity costs and generating 60 to 75 million metric tons of avoidable CO₂ over a 25-year asset life, despite a typical payback period of a few months to up to three years.
Industrial energy efficiency is gaining importance as the global energy transition accelerates, with rising demand from AI and data centers adding pressure to electricity systems.
“Industry has spent decades optimizing what happens inside a plant,” Yet, large motors and generators have rarely been part of that conversation—even though they run continuously for 25 years and sometimes more—converting more energy to motion than almost anything else on site.” said David Bjerhag, ABB's global business line manager for high-speed synchronous motors and generators.
The TIE initiative is ABB’s contractual commitment to deliver large synchronous motors and generators with the highest possible energy efficiency, without compromising reliability or specification compliance. Open to OEMs, EPCs and end users, it enables solutions optimized for lifecycle performance rather than upfront cost.
The report highlights adoption trends by country and industry segment, showing how uptake varies across regions and applications. The TIE option reportedly delivers 98.7% to 98.8% efficiency compared with a standard 98.5%. This represents a 0.2 percentage‑point improvement that serves as a baseline, with gains of 1 to 1.5 percentage points achievable in some applications, particularly induction-based systems.
According to ABB, applying that TIE 0.2 percentage-point efficiency improvement across the global installed base of industrial motors and generators would save 4 to 6 TWh per year, enough electricity to power roughly 750,000 to 1 million OECD households.
Over a 25-year motor lifetime, that figure rises to 100 to 150 TWh of electricity saved, equivalent to powering the United Kingdom for five months—with associated CO₂ reductions of 60 to 75 million metric tons, equivalent to taking 13 to 16 million cars off the road permanently.
The report sets out a clear set of actions to accelerate adoption. It calls on industry to move beyond upfront cost and embed energy efficiency into procurement decisions, including specifying minimum performance levels and requesting optimized designs. It also highlights the importance of using total cost of ownership as the primary decision metric, aligning incentives across engineering, procurement and energy management teams. Stronger collaboration across manufacturers, OEMs and EPCs will be critical to ensure high-efficiency systems are specified early and delivered at scale.
View the full report here.
