How Do Electric Motors Help The Environment?

There are a lot of words and phrases tossed around when the topic of electric motors comes up. One of these phrases is ‘environmentally friendly’, but in what ways do these motors really help the environment?

They are becoming increasingly used in windmills, which, in turn, are used to generate wind-powered ‘clean’ electricity. Electric motors are used to rotate the windmill heads 360* so that the blades are always placed within the wind’s current, allowing for increased opportunities to collect energy.

Electric motors are also frequently used in gate-operated dams. These kinds of dams require the motors to open and close the gates, allowing water to flow through or be blocked when needed. Gate-operated dams are quite often used in the production of hydro electricity, another clean energy source.

The use of electric engines in cars and other vehicles helps to reduce the tailpipe emissions and overall carbon footprint that gas and petrol powered cars leave on the environment. Cars running solely on electricity do not release any pollution or tailpipe emissions, and even hybrid cars’ emissions are greatly reduced. Electric motors are also much more energy efficient than either gas or petrol engines – 90% of the energy produced actually makes it to the road, compared to the 15-20% that makes it in a gas or petrol model.

While the construction of electric motors, including the various batteries that are used to run them, quite often uses energy produced by coal (which is very environmentally damaging), this does not necessarily have to be the case. Motors and batteries created using ‘clean’ energy, such as wind-, hydro-, solar- and nuclear-power, are just as environmentally sustainable as the motors and batteries themselves.