It was installed in the 1920s, rated at 90 horsepower, and it remains operational as a standby unit. That a piece of industrial machinery from that era should survive at all is unusual; that it should still function, even in reserve, is quietly remarkable.

The creamery appears on the 1905 Ordnance Survey six-inch map, and its original power source was a large waterwheel fed by a millrace drawn from the Douglas River by a weir roughly 800 metres to the south. A millrace is an artificial channel that diverts river water to drive a wheel, and this one would have supplied the steady flow needed to process milk coming in from surrounding farms. At some point the waterwheel was replaced by a steam engine, reflecting a pattern common across Irish rural industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as steam technology became more accessible. Two turbines were subsequently installed, one rated at 10 horsepower and designated as a fire-fighting unit, the other at 30 horsepower to drive the creamery's machinery. Both turbines survive on site, though neither is any longer in use. The gas engine that followed in the 1920s was, by contrast, a more flexible solution, capable of generating substantial power without dependence on water levels or coal supply, and its continued presence as a working standby makes the Lombardstown creamery something of an accidental record of a century's worth of changing industrial power.