In 1964 UT announced that designs were being prepared for a steam plant to serve the entire campus, including the urban renewal area that had been added to the main and agriculture campuses. It was located just west of Seventeenth Street and south of Princeton Avenue between the L&N and Southern railroad tracks. The UT steam plant was placed into service on May 1, 1966. Its construction cost was $3.7 million, and its 300-foot smokestack was the tallest structure on campus.
When completed, the steam plant contained three coal-fired boilers manufactured by Union Iron Works, each of which was capable of producing more than one hundred thousand pounds of steam an hour. It replaced the use of the steam plant on Middle Drive, now Pasqua Nuclear Engineering. In 1977 work on a new antipollution system was completed and the $1 million electrostatic precipitator was activated. Eleven miles of underground steam pipe and return lines eventually would crisscross the campuses. Major components of the steam plant grew to include two stoker-fed coal-fired boilers, one boiler that could use natural gas or coal, and one natural- gas-fired turbine generator with a heat recovery boiler. On average, more than one hundred tons of coal were required each day, and in 2012 UT announced that it planned to move solely to the use of natural gas and to rebuild the steam plant, meaning that the smokestack would be razed and a smaller facility would be needed. Engineers for the project were I. C. Thomasson, and the contractor was Southern Contractors. Bids were received in November 2013 for the $25 million project, and work on the three-phase project began in March 2014. Razing the smokestack, the major component of phase III, was anticipated to be complete by November 2015.
UT had to comply with EPA regulations limiting emissions of mercury and other pollutants by 2016. Converting to natural gas would result in a reduction of 50 percent of emissions and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by two-thirds.