Ad watchdog bans "misleading" E.ON wind farm promotion

E.ON has become the latest energy company to have its wrists slapped by the Advertising Standards Authority following a complaint against a series of adverts promoting plans for a new wind farm in West Ancroft, Northumberland.

The watchdog upheld two of three complaints against the series of adverts, concluding they used "misleading images" to provide a visual representation of the planned development.

E.ON distributed three pieces of promotional material inviting local residents to attend an exhibition on the planned 18MW wind farm.

One of the adverts used a picture of an existing E.ON wind farm in Cumbria, while another used a photomontage mock up of the planned development at West Ancroft.

However, the complainant argued the images were misleading and designed to downplay the visual impact of the new development, as the turbines shown at the Cumbria wind farm were half the size of the 125m turbines planned for Northumberland, and the photomontage provided an image of the turbines from several kilometres away.

In its response to the ASA, E.ON said it was "clear that the site was only in the development phase and therefore an image of the particular wind farm was not possible".

It added that the image of the Cumbrian wind farm had been purposefully selected to avoid any confusion and featured the sea in the back drop to ensure it could not be mistaken for the proposed West Ancroft site. It also argued that the "image provided no scale comparisons, for instance, vehicles or buildings, and was therefore not misleading as to the comparative size of the prospective turbines".

In addition, the company said that the photomontage had been developed in line with requirements set out by Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) and Guidelines for Landscape and Visual assessments.

However, in its ruling the ASA upheld the two complaints. It said that the disparity in the size of the turbines in Cumbria and those planned for West Ancroft meant that the image was "likely to mislead". It also ruled that while the photomontage had followed established guidelines, the decision to present the proposed development from the perspective of several kilometres away meant that it was " not sufficiently representative of the likely visual impact" of the project and as a result the ad "was likely to mislead".

The watchdog ordered E.ON to no longer distribute the ads in their current form, and warned it to ensure that in future use of generic or photomontage images of wind farms should be more representative of proposed developments.

A spokesman for E.ON said the company was now reviewing its procedures for promoting proposed wind farm developments. "This is the first time we have been ruled against by the ASA on a wind farm advertisement," he said. "We had no intention to mislead people and were trying to represent how a generic wind farm would look."

The ASA did however reject a complaint that E.ON's projection that the new wind farm could provide energy for about 10,200 homes was misleading, ruling that the energy company's prediction was clearly an estimate and had been calculated using government-approved methodologies.