News

On the evening of 24 April we put out a light trap for moths in the hydro garden. It was quite a chilly evening and the following morning we found just one visitor in the trap – this velvety brown muslin moth. This was a male, dark in colour and nocturnal. The females are white…

Eight members of Wallingford U3A science group visited the hydro on 15 April to hear about what we do and how it all came about. There was a great deal of interest and engagement. The visit was organised by Dr Anna Harvey (far left), the science and technology coordinator for the group.

In the last 12 months we have seen a strong performance from both the hydro and our solar PV arrays. For the year April 2024 to March 2025 hydro generation was 177,553kWh. This is a big improvement on the last 2 years, and close to our target level of 186,000kWh per year. March was a…

A group of international students from Reading University visited the hydro on 13 March. The group, from the MSc course in Agriculture and Development, was accompanied by Dr Andrew Ainslie and briefed about the hydro by Simon Collings, a director of WOCoRe. The group was visiting two other small hydro sites on the Thames, including…

Record rainfall in September led to high river flows which prevented us from generating for much of October (see earlier post). We came back online on 25 October and have been running at close to full capacity since 1 November. In mid-November we passed a generation milestone: 1.5 million kWh produced since we started in…

Over the summer we started developing the hydro site as a wildlife garden. Visitors will have noticed the flowers in the border just inside the gate. We also stopped cutting the lawn to let the grass and other plants there flower and seed. Recently we cleared a huge pile of hedge trimmings which had built…

We were excited to start generating again on 23 September, but the record-breaking rainfall on that day meant we had to shut down again soon after.

With recent heavy rainfall the hydro has started this season's generation.

We welcomed over 100 visitors to the hydro on Sunday 15 September as part of Oxford Open Doors.

Kerry McCarthy, Minister for Climate in the new government, came to Osney Lock Hydro on 18 July as part of a visit to Low Carbon Hub. The minister wanted to learn how LCH has worked with the local community on innovative projects to accelerate the transition to net zero. As well as seeing the hydro,…

A group of community-share practitioners visited the hydro on 2 July. The practitioners come from across the UK. They meet regularly to share knowledge and experience and support each other to grow and innovate in the community-shares market.  The group was in Oxford on a visit organised by Co-operatives UK to hear more about the…

Volunteer moth recorders Hugo and Frankie Crombie and Simon Collings set up a light trap at the hydro on 29 June. They were back on site at 5 the next morning to see what they had caught. The star find was a buff-tip moth that resembles a piece of twig when at rest. Other moth…