As one of the global leaders in power transmission and distribution technology, and a leading automation company, ABB helps achieve energy savings at every step of the energy chain, from harvesting primary energy through transportation and processing to delivery to end users. By reducing power consumption and losses, improving productivities and managing electrical equipment more effectively, ABB technologies can reduce energy waste and more than double the current productivity of the energy value chain. Moreover, ABB is the market leader for key energy-saving technologies in emerging economies, where energy-efficiency needs and potential are the greatest. 

The vast majority of ABB’s industrial product range improves energy savings by helping factories run more productively with state-of-the-art control systems, automation products and electrical equipment. Our key technologies include controls, enterprise software, instrumentations, low voltage products, motors and drives, robots and turbochargers.

The energy saving potential in industry is enormous in motor systems alone: hundreds of millions of electric motors driving machines, compressors, fans, pumps or conveyors in virtually all sectors account for about 67 per cent of the electricity industry uses.

More than 90 per cent of these motors either cannot adjust their power consumption or use only crude and grossly inefficient ways to do so. Many are constantly running at full speed regardless of actual output requirements. In many applications, energy can be cut to one-eighth just by adjusting motor speed to one-half. By connecting a motor to a variable-speed drive (VSD), the motor speed can be matched exactly to the job at hand, ensuring that no more power than necessary is used. Typical applications can achieve energy savings by 30 per cent, meaning that an investment in VSD can often pay for itself in less than a year. A new ABB low-voltage drive features an innovative built-in energy counter that shows the amount of energy saved and even the quantity of CO2 emissions avoided by using the drive to regulate the speed of the motor. ABB has delivered more than 2.5 million energy-efficient motor control devices. The installed-base of ABB low-voltage drives alone saved more than 170 millions magawatt-hours of electricity in 2008, equal to the annual electricity consumption of 42 million households in the 27 member states of the European Union.