News

We’ve been spotting a variety of bee species at the hydro this spring. They are feeding on nectar from the flowering shrubs and trees and the plants in the flower border. Here are photos of some of them. Davies’ colletes This is a type of plasterer bee. Like the mining bees the females create a…

WOCoRe and Low Carbon West Oxford are seeking views from Osney residents about creating a forum for people interested in wildlife gardening. Many people who live on Osney Island already support wildlife, for example by growing pollinator-friendly plants, feeding garden birds and providing nest boxes.  Currently there is no community forum through which people interested in wildlife gardening can share experiences,…

WOCoRe is partnering with a new flood action group in South Oxford to help them manage grant funding for an innovative project. South Oxford Flood Action Group (SOFLAG) has been awarded a grant of just under £20,000 to set up a local flood monitoring system. This includes a borehole and gauge boards on local streams and ditches. Local…

Barbara Hammond was on That’s TV this week talking about the anniversary of Osney Lock Hydro. She emphasised the importance of the site in raising awareness of the potential of community generation. You can see the short piece on Facebook and X.

Thanks to volunteer Alan Barlow, the bench and chairs in the hydro garden have been fully renovated so visitors can sit and watch the river. Alan has also made a bird box and a couple of bee nesting boxes which were installed on site today.

The latest Oxford Sausage blog features the hydro. It stars in a piece about Osney’s history of using the river as a source of power.

Osney Lock Hydro started operating on 16 May 2015. Investors, volunteers, partners and directors gathered on the evening of Friday 16 May 2025 to mark its 10th birthday. A commemorative bench for David Hammond RIBA, architect and driving force behind the initial project, was officially unveiled. David died in 2023. Founder director and company secretary…

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…