Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) techniques are widely used in PV-operated, inverter-controlled AC motor drives. The frequency and magnitude of the voltage applied to the motors are controlled using PWM-based PV-operated drives. PWM is the standard approach for operating the inverter in order to generate high quality output voltage. In past decades, the performance of the PWM techniques were determined using power factor, transient response and efficiency, which play a major role in the regulation of PWM inverters so that a dynamic response can be obtained in grid-connected facilities. Conventional PWM such as PWM, Sinusoidal PWM (SPWM) and Space-Vector PWM (SVPWM) perform satisfactorily in terms of average switching frequency requirement, switching losses and DC bus current ripple, with respect to driving AC induction motors. However, they have poor harmonic characteristics leading to degradation of torque and speed profile of AC motor. In order to overcome the aforementioned drawback, the proposed work investigated the harmonic contents of the mentioned PWM techniques, torque and speed profiles with regards to the AC drive applications. The simulation study revealed that the 2nd, 5th and 8th order (negative sequence) harmonics introduced more problems related to torque and the 4th and 7th (positive sequence) harmonics created more heating problems. Further, the 3rd, 6th and 9th (zero sequence) harmonics caused heat due to addition of voltage and/or current in a neutral conductor. The main objective of the paper was to compare the three well established PWM methods with respect to the AC drive application in the context of effect of harmonics, by analysing their ease of implementation, output harmonic spectra voltage and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD).