Located between Spartan Stadium and the International Center, the Shaw Lane Power Plant sits unoccupied, looking for a purpose. It has been that way for nearly 32 years.

The power plant’s smokestack towers over the Michigan State University campus. On its sides are the letters “MSC”, for Michigan State College, the University’s name prior to 1955.

The smokestack rivals Beaumont Tower as one of the defining feature of the MSU’s campus. You can see it on television every time the Spartans plays a home football game and it is even part of Spartan Stadium in the popular video game series NCAA Football. On a poll on one Spartan fan message board an overwhelming majority of users deemed the smokestack a landmark. But unlike Beaumont Tower, this landmark remains off limits to all but a few MSU employees.

Utility Services Director Bob Ellerhorst gave Sparty Secrets an exclusive tour of this off-limits landmark. The power plant is an old building, with many safety hazards. Entering the building without permission from the University is considered trespassing by law. We at Sparty Secrets strongly recommend against seeing the inside of this building for yourself.

A tour of the Landmark

The exterior of the power plant is surprisingly scenic. The building’s architecture is Collegiate Gothic, like many of the buildings at MSU. The red brick walls are covered with ivy, as are the greenhouse style windows. The slanted roof forms a point down the middle and has turrets extending upward.

To enter the building employees use the loading dock gate located on the north side of the building, next to the smokestack. The main entrance, which faces the intersection of Shaw Ln. and Red Cedar Rd., is no longer in use.

With no functioning lights, the interior of the power plant is surprisingly bright. This is because of the greenhouse style windows that line the west wall of the main section of the power plant.

Inside, the building is mostly an open structure. Looking up you can see metal staircases extending three or four stories high and old technology that reaches just as high. From the windows, Spartan Stadium is in clear view. The main room is noiseless, because the once jarringly loud equipment was silenced long ago. Near the main entrance is a large hole where the boilers used to stand before they were sold.

There is no elevator servicing the building, so to get between floors we were forced to take the stairs. In one of the staircases there was a large metal circular opening in the equipment. Maintenance workers crawl through the hole to do internal inspections on the machinery.

The basement is nearly pitch black. It could easily be mistaken for a setting in a horror film. The smell is musty, probably because of the puddles of standing water. A locker room and showers are located in one corner of this basement.

While the employees who once worked in the Shaw Plant have all retired, the pitch black room is one of the eerie places where a human presence is still felt. The other is in the second floor, where the office and boiler chemical lab was located. These rooms are filled with garbage and old science equipment that has not been used in more than thirty years.

The top floor of the Shaw Plant is the home of its current inhabitants: birds. Avians are perched in the rafters, fluttering around as visitors enter. Their feces covers nearly every surface of this room. In the corner is a staircase leading to the coal conveyer. There is an open catwalk extending into the darkness.

Underneath are the coalbunkers, which are still partially filled with coal that was left unused during the plant’s final day in 1975. The coal bunkers look like large funnels that lead directly into the old burners.

According to Ellerhorst, the burners operated like a barbeque grill, with lumps of coal in the bottom of the furnace, as opposed to the technology at the current Simon Plant, where the coal is pulverized. The coal at the Shaw Plant burns slow so the temperature and pressure is lower, as is the energy output.

History of the Shaw Power Plant

The Shaw Lane Power Plant was built in 1948 to accommodate Michigan State College’s rapidly growing student body. From 1921, when the University was known as Michigan Agricultural College, to when the Shaw Plant was built in 1948, most of MSU’s power came from a coal plant located on what today is the front lawn of the Hannah Administration Building.

Like the Shaw Plant, the bricks of the smokestack were arranged to spell the university’s name at the time: “MAC.” Coal was delivered to this plant via a railway running through what is now south campus. To this day, a power substation remains underground in this location, serving as a junction box for MSU’s grid.

As World War II came to a close, MSU’s most rapid period of expansion had begun. The Shaw Power Plant was built to accommodate this growth. Its location was chosen because of its proximity to the coal railways. Initially the Shaw plant had two boilers, but added a third in 1958. Under the leadership of University President John Hannah, the student population skyrocketed from 15,000 to 38,000.

After only a couple decades, the power plant was could no longer adequately serve the University.

“The technology for this power plant was the wrong technology for a major university. It was built for ten thousand students, not forty thousand students,” MSU Utility Services Director Bob Ellerhorst told Sparty Secrets.

In 1966, the university designated an old power plant on the periphery of campus to be MSU’s power plant of the future. With two boilers and newer technology, the old Simon Power Plant located on Service Rd. could now supply the entire university with energy. The old power plant in north campus was decommissioned and demolished, and the role of the Shaw plant was drastically reduced.

In 1975, the Shaw Power Plant burned its last coal. For the next twenty years, the power plant acted as a power switching station. The last redistribution of power happened in the summer of 2005. Currently the basement of the plant is used as storage space by Utility Services, but according to Ellerhorst they are slowly moving out.

Searching for a Purpose

The Shaw Lane Power Plant is located in the dead center of campus. The building is structurally sound and architecturally very interesting, but the university is unable to come up with a use for the building.

According to Steve Troost, MSU’s campus planner, money is the biggest roadblock. To clean up the building and convert it into another use, the old technology that now sits unused would have to be removed along with the asbestos that lines the walls.

If the money ever comes together for a clean up, the building would most likely be for heavier use, like a machine shop for the College of Engineering, for instance. For a while, the office of Campus Planning and Administration considered making it the new home of the School of Planning, Design and Construction. But instead they were moved to the Human Ecology Building.

“This is not going to be a classroom building, but there must be something that could fit in here,” said Ellerhorst.

After more than two years of sitting abandoned, there are no plans for the Shaw Lane Power Plant. “Never say never but…”Troost told Sparty Secrets.