This building originally belonged to a blast furnace plant. The blast furnace disappeared in the 1980s, but this building, built in 1901 as a power station for the Cockerill steel company, was spared. It was one of the first power stations to use blast furnace gas to power gas engines.

Two engineers at Cockerill, Bailly and Kraft, had been trying since 1895 to recover the gas from the blast furnaces as fuel for gas engines. In December 1895, they were the first to successfully get an experimental 4-horsepower gas engine running. The Cockerill company was thus one of the first, if not the first in the world, to power engines by capturing and recovering the gas from the blast furnaces. In its early years, this plant housed two 500-kilowatt and four 1,000-kilowatt engines. Together with the gas engines in a second plant, powered by gas from the coke ovens, the total power output was just under 6,000 kilowatts.

Since the early 1990s, when the blast furnace disappeared, no electricity had been generated here. The Swedish metallurgical company Åkers moved into the expansive plant to produce cylinders for rolling mills. In 2010, at the height of the crisis in the steel industry, Åkers also withdrew from the building.