Louisville Gas and Electric Company and Kentucky Utilities Company (LG&E and KU), subsidiaries of PPL Corporation, have replaced their lawn mowing equipment at the E.W. Brown Generating Station in Harrodsburg, Ky., with a herd of sheep.

The Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill farm managers care for the flock of more than 200 during the colder winter months and, now that spring has arrived, have returned them to the solar facility to keep the vegetation from interfering with the facility’s 44,000 solar panels that help power the community with renewable energy. Using sheep to control vegetation is environmentally friendly and also practical—it can be challenging and time consuming to use traditional mowing equipment under and around the solar panels. Instead, the sheep will be on the grounds throughout the spring and summer to “mow” the 50-acre facility.

"We’re really proud of what we’ve done here, not only with [the E.W. Brown Generating Station] being Kentucky’s first and largest solar project to date, but we also are proud about how we sustainably manage it,” said Aron Patrick, director of research and development at LG&E and KU. “We hope that this not only is a model for us and how we manage solar sites in the future, but we hope that this is a model for solar sites all over the United States and the world.”

Watch the sheep graze on LG&E and KU’s “EweTube” page.