Ad description
A radio ad for energy supplier EDF, heard on 7 September 2024, stated, “Your electricity bill could be nil. Yep, nothing. Because when you install solar panels and a battery with EDF, you don’t just get electricity when it’s sunny, you can store it for a rainy day too. EDF, change is in our power. For potential zero pound bills, buy ten to twelve of our solar panels, a battery, and join Empower Exclusive […]”.
Issue
The complainants challenged whether the claim “you don’t just get electricity when it’s sunny, you can store it for a rainy day too” was misleading because they believed the solar panels and battery would not generate and store enough power to provide electricity during the winter months.Response
EDF Energy Ltd t/a EDF said the ad claimed that electricity generated while it was sunny could be stored for use on another, less sunny, day. There was nothing in the claim that implied the electricity stored would be sufficient to meet months’ worth of usage during the darker months, and they would not expect consumers to understand the claim in that way since it would not be a credible claim. The claim was that the power generated on one day could be stored and used on a different day, which was factually correct.
EDF said on an average summer day a typical household would use approximately 5.92 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity, solar panels would generate an average of 14.1 kWh of energy (calculated as the average of 12.82 kWh and 15.39 kWh – the accepted range during sunny days), and the battery could consistently store 5.32 kWh of energy. Those figures demonstrated that even after taking into account daily usage, the panels and battery would be able to store surplus energy that could be used on a different day that should be sufficient to meet the overwhelming majority of that consumer’s usage on a separate day, even if the panels did not generate anything at all on that separate day. They said that scenario was unlikely to occur since even during the worst days during the winter period the panels are still likely to generate around 1.6 kWh of power, and possibly up to around 1.97 kWh.EDF said the figure 5.92kWh was based on the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets (Ofgem)’s 2023 Typical Domestic Consumption Values (TDCVs) review. The TDCVs were industry standard values for the annual electricity usage of a typical domestic user. The 2023 review included a range of households of one to three people with an annual power use of between 1,800 kWh (4.9 kWh per day) and 2,700 kWh (7.4 kWh per day). EDF had adopted 2,161 kWh per year (5.92 kWh per day) for a sunny day. Panel generation figures had been calculated in accordance with MSC’s Solar PV Standard (MIS-3002). MSC certified low-carbon products and installations used to produce electricity and heat from renewable sources in the UK. The figure 14.1 kWh had been calculated using the formula set out in MSC’s MIS-3002 guidance
.Radiocentre endorsed EDF’s response.
Assessment
Upheld
The ad made the claim “Your electricity bill could be nil”, which was followed by the claim that consumers could store energy generated by their solar panels on sunny days “for a rainy day”.
The ASA considered consumers would understand from those claims that if they bought 10 to 12 EDF solar panels and a battery, surplus energy generated by the panels on sunny days could be stored in the battery for use on days when it was too dark for the panels to generate enough power to meet their needs. In the context of the ad, we considered consumers would understand the phrase “rainy day” as a general period of time where the sun shone less. In that context we considered consumers would understand from the ad that any given monthly electricity bill could be reduced to nil, since any short fall in power generated by the panels on darker days would be met by the energy stored in the battery.
Ofgem’s 2023 Decision on TDCVs, its most recent, stated a low electricity household usage of 1,800 kWh (4.93 kWh per day), medium usage of 2,700 kWh (7.39 kWh per day), and high usage of 4,100 kWh (11.23 kWh per day). We understood the “medium” usage figure reflected the median household consumption, whereas the “low” and “high” usage groups represented lower and higher quartiles of household consumption. EDF had calculated average daily consumption on the basis of the lower quartile and the median, which gave a lower daily average consumption (5.92 kWh) than the median (7.39 kWh). Solar panels generated an average of 14.1 kWh of energy on sunny days, and typically between 1.6 kWh and 1.97 kWh on the darkest days. We understood a battery could store around 5.32 kWh of energy, less than the Ofgem-stated median average daily consumption.While it was possible there would be days when an energy deficit could be balanced out by the power stored in the battery, that power was unlikely to be sufficient to balance a consumer’s usage, such that they had nothing to pay. It was therefore unlikely that any given bill, outside of the sunnier months of the year, would be reduced to nil as a result of the advertised tariff. While EDF said the claim had been intended literally as meaning that energy stored in the battery one day could be used on the next consecutive day, that had not been included in the ad. Furthermore, the claims had been based on calculations that used average figures, taken from the Ofgem Decision and an industry standard calculation, the former based on households of one to three people. They were therefore not necessarily representative of what a consumer would achieve. That information had also not been included in the ad. We considered that both of those pieces of information were material to consumers’ understanding of the ad and so should have been made clear.
For those reasons we concluded the ad was likely to mislead.
The ad breached BCAP Code rules 3.1, 3.2 (Misleading advertising), and 3.9 (Substantiation).
Action
The ad must not appear again in the form complained of. We told EDF Energy Ltd t/a EDF to ensure future ads made clear the basis of any claims, where the omission of that information was likely to mislead.
