ABB has published a report estimating that a 0.2 percentage-point improvement in large motor and generator efficiency could save industrial operators billions of dollars in avoided electricity costs over the working life of installed assets.
The Industrial Efficiency Gap report draws on more than 1,000 large synchronous motors and generators delivered from ABB’s Västerås manufacturing facility in Sweden between 2015 and 2025. Its analysis compares routinely specified machines with ABB’s Top Industrial Efficiency, or TIE, approach, which is designed to deliver the highest possible energy efficiency without compromising reliability or specification compliance.
Large motors sit deep inside the cost base of heavy industry. Motors rated above 375 kW account for an estimated 10.4% of global electricity demand, according to ABB, and demand from that class of equipment is projected to double by 2040. In continuous-duty applications, small losses at the point of specification are carried through 25 years or more of operation.
For large synchronous machines, ABB says the TIE option typically lifts efficiency from around 98.5% to 98.7–98.8%. That 0.2 percentage-point gain is used as the baseline for the report’s global modelling, although the company says improvements of 1 to 1.5 percentage points can be achieved in some induction-based 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 even more, converting more energy than almost anything else on site,” said David Bjerhag, Global Business Line Manager, High Speed Synchronous at ABB. “The gap between a standard machine and a TIE-optimized one is not technological. It is a specification gap. The companies closing it fastest are the ones where the engineer who selects the motor and the CFO or CSO responsible for energy performance are aligned around a single metric: total cost of ownership.”
Applied across the global installed base of comparable equipment, the 0.2 percentage-point improvement would save 4 to 6 TWh of electricity each year, ABB estimates. Across a 25-year operating life, the cumulative saving rises to 100 to 150 TWh, with associated avoided emissions of 60 to 75 million tonnes of CO₂ and electricity cost savings of $9.5 billion to $12 billion.
The report includes a 56 MW TIE-optimised synchronous motor delivered to a steel plant in India in 2025. ABB says the machine achieved a verified efficiency of 99.13%, with projected lifetime electricity savings of $5.9 million, avoided emissions of 45,000 tonnes of CO₂, and a payback period of just over three months.
Procurement practice carries much of the burden. Motors and generators are often assessed against upfront equipment cost, even when electricity consumption dominates total cost of ownership. ABB’s report calls for efficiency requirements to be embedded earlier in RFQs, OEM specifications, EPC decisions, and end-user procurement models, with the full report available through ABB’s Industrial Efficiency Gap report.
