Los Angeles-based Capstone Turbine has announced a sale to Paris-based Soffimat for more than 90 30-kW, biogas-fueled microturbines - a 2.8 Mw order. Soffimat will deploy the equipment at four landfills in France, where units will be fueled completely by waste gases from the landfills to produce electricity. Normally, landfill gases are burned off into the atmosphere.

"Last year, Soffimat commissioned their first Capstone array at a landfill 100 kilometers north of Paris," said Tony Hynes, Capstone's vice-president of sales and service. "The project was a tremendous success. Based on their confidence in our systems' reliability and low emissions profile on biogas fuels, in October 2004, they placed a follow-on order for a megawatt of our products. Now, with today's much larger order, Soffimat continues to bring this renewable energy success to larger landfill sites throughout France. In one instance, at a landfill near Lyon, the array will be nearly quadruple that of their first installation."

The order was an addition to earlier orders between the companies.