Electric Power From Your Cotton Candy? Caterpillar Customer's Unique Biogas Solution

The colorful cotton candy from your theme park visit is fueling more than just a sugar high. Caterpillar is applying sustainability practices to help deploy a unique waste-to-energy solution in Orlando, Florida – one of the United States’ most popular tourist destinations – turning that left over cotton candy and other food waste into power.

Harvest Power, a Caterpillar customer serviced by our dealer Ring Power, is using Caterpillar’s biogas generators to turn 120,000 tons of food waste into 5.2 megawatts of power each year – enough to power 2,000 homes. Harvest Power collects food waste from Orlando theme parks, hotels and restaurants as well as biosolids from municipal waste, and uses a process of anaerobic digestion to break down the waste into a renewable biogas. The digesters ferment the various forms of waste and produce methane, which is captured and used to power two Caterpillar biogas generators.

This innovative, sustainable solution to power generation was recently featured on Green Room TV with John Holden, which aired today on the History Channel.

Watch the video segment here.

Consider some of the sustainability benefits of this unique power generation solution:

• Renewable energy source for the Orlando community
• Diverting waste from landfills
• Capturing and utilizing methane – a greenhouse gas – for productive use, rather than allowing it to accumulate in the atmosphere
• Returning the organic matter left over from the energy generation process to the land as fertilizer

Learn more about Caterpillar’s sustainability work by visiting Caterpillar.com/sustainability.