Motor drive is a widely used technology, offering many advantages, such as exceptional speed, torque control as well as greater flexibility. Improvement of reliability and efficiency has become a great research interest. Towards this direction and taking into account the major developments in permanent machines technology over the latest years, the use energy recovery converters has been introduced in various industrial applications. In this paper, the effects of harmonics on a three-phase motor controlled by a drive will be analyzed and the portion of kinetic energy that can be recovered will be estimated by regenerative drives. The main contribution of this study is a methodology to foresee the standards that can be achieved with the use of such an energy recovery feature. Also, the existence of an optimum operation duration that maximizes the recovered energy is discussed. The analysis presented in this paper is proposed to be validated experimentally