Electric Motors

Motors have the third largest potential for emission and energy consumption reduction among products after boilers and water heaters. They constitute an industry rather than a consumer product category, and as such are responsible for 70% of industrial and 40% of tertiary electricity consumption in Europe. Very substantial energy savings can be achieved by removing the least efficient industrial motors from the market, and by reducing the size and incorporating variable speed drives into the remaining motors.

After discussing this issue for over a year, on 11 March 2009 European decision-makers approved a policy that should reduce annual CO2 emissions by 63 million tons and save 135 TWh of electricity – equivalent to the overall domestic consumption of Germany.  However, under pressure from motor manufacturers, officials have stretched the timeline for implementation. Small motors will have until 2017 to comply with regulations, which is much too long a delay in our view. We covered this in the coolproducts blog entry Votes on motors...

• Good products: permanent magnet motors, the newest, super-efficient technology coupled with adequate variable speed drives and controls
• Bad products: over-sized old technologies unable to optimise their consumption to the user needs

(Last update: May 2011)

Further reading:
- Find out more about the EU process on our expert pages
-Read more about EU work on efficient motors