This headline is misleading clickbait. Koch Industries owns a company that's developing software that could reduce AC induction motor energy consumption by 1/3. They haven't actually done it yet.

Asking as an ill-informed European.

Is this the Koch of the Koch Brothers that I only know as the financiers behind the GOP and climate denialism and bankrolling efforts to gut environmental protection laws?

Seems like they installed variable frequency drives (their "algorithm) on their motors; nothing more.

Worth pointing out that due to their efficiency, what this has to be about is not making the motors more efficient, but reducing the power output, e.g. by making the driven mechanical load more efficient.

Edit: Skimming the article makes it sound like they switched from U/f control to vector control.

I learned something new, the efficiency rating is really different than what occurs when in use, so 90% efficiency pans out as less than 70%. So the work here is to keep the temperature of the motor down to maintain efficiency.

the difficulty is not all motors are of course able to be programmed so while this fix will help those that are it does point out that there are still big energy savings to be had to replace existing 'dumb' motors. Now I will mention the obvious, none of them should be on the net but I can see a local network that is air gap being useful

To be clear, AC motors can already be 98+% efficient. So, those double digit gains are inherently limited to a subset of relatively inefficient motors. It’s very much useful research, but don’t expect miricals.

The article is a bit misleading. They talk about how many AC induction motors there are and how much power they consume. I don't doubt those numbers. But the vast majority of those are synchronous: they run at a set speed.

What they are working on is variable speed motors which need a special "drive" (aka VFD) device to convert the constant 50 or 60 Hz power supply to a variable frequency. Now VFDs are getting more common as simply using a VFD can make big efficiency gains on a process. But VFDs are still not the norm yet.

Reducing per unit energy consumption (aka increasing energy efficiency) is not only very different from reducing global energy consumption, but it can often lead to an increase in global energy consumption. This is called Jevons paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox and is quite an interesting topic.

The same company that poisons poor residents downstream in Crosset, AK and subverts democracy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_Brothers_Exposed

The Koch brothers hired private investigators to trail, intimidate, and attempt to get dirt on Jane Mayer when she was writing Dark Money -- a book about how they covertly funded ultra-right wingers and climate sceptics to protect their hundreds of billions of dollars of oil investments. Charles Koch literally shoulders a non-trivial amount of responsibility for a possible coming semi-apocalypse, and he makes plenty of movie villains look laughably tame in comparison.

But this is a good step.

Excuse me, but this is an utter bs for anybody minimally familiar with physics, let alone engineering.

I have a feeling that Neil Singer gives off air of a scam artist

The big news here is that Koch industries is actually issuing a press release bragging about reducing energy consumption. The mere fact that Koch industries publicly states that using less energy something to be proud of is a big change.

As far as the actual energy savings, technology wise they are not really anything new. Such savings are only possible because their machines seem to have been very energy inefficient to begin with.

If they really want to push the edge they should get rid of their lossy induction motors and install BLDCs or reluctance motors.

But they are correct that electric motors use up a lot of the worlds power and existing known improvements in electric motors can greatly reduce power use.