News

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…

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.