High fertile soil and optimum sunlight lead to steady increasing sugarcane production in India. It directs second place in sugarcane production. At the same time, the sugarcane-based industries are facing a huge hurdle of disposal of solid residual called biowaste. It is a major issue in a fast-developing country like India. Pyro-oil from biowaste is one of the favourable resources for alternate energy. In this paper, a solar concentrator was designed and fabricated for torrefying the biowaste to improve the bio-oil yield from pyrolysis reaction. The biowaste form sugarcane was characteristic by the thermal-degradation analysis and internal composition analysis. The biowaste was torrefied at various temperature 160 °C, 170 °C, 180 °C, 190 °C. The optimum temperature for the torrefaction was 180 °C at 1hour. The pyro-oil yield was 25.8% and 22.1% for torrefied biowaste and wet biowaste respectively. © 2019 IOP Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved.