Tell Me What You Eat: Omnivorous Jenbacher Engines Use Whisky Mash, Manure, Old Lunches to Power Farms, Plants and Neighborhoods

What do you do when you run a growing business in a booming country in Africa and Asia but run out of electricity? What if your plant in America or in Germany gets slammed by a big storm or a heat wave and grid goes down? One answer is to build your own power plant.

This solution, which once looked expensive and preposterous, is not far-fetched at all. GE calls a network of small, independent power plants that can power farms, companies and even entire towns distributed power. The workhorse in GE’s distributed power portfolio is a family of Jenbacher gas engines. The engines often work with technology that turns a source of abundant waste including cheese whey, whisky mash, discarded school lunches, and sewage sludge into biogas. The Jenbachers then convert the biogas into electricity. Take a look at our infographic that explains the scope and spread of Jenbacher-powered power plants.