Passivity-based control is a methodology to design (possibly nonlinear) controllers for nonlinear physical systems modifying its total energy function and damping characteristics. In this article, the basic principles of this technique, and some of the recent results of application for high performance AC drives, are briefly reviewed. Since the target audience of this article is the drives community, the material is presented emphasising its immediate practical applicability, with minimal mathematical details. However, it is underscored that in all applications, a rigorous stability analysis for the full nonlinear dynamics has been reported in the literature.