Who actually regulates your energy marketing claims

The line "100% renewable electricity" can be waved through by the regulator that issued the certificates behind it and still be ruled misleading by the regulator that read the poster. Same supplier, same paperwork, two verdicts. That is not a loophole or a regulatory failure. It is what happens when three separate remits sit on top of one advert.

This lesson draws the mapmapUsing software to automate repetitive marketing tasks and campaigns, enabling personalisation at scale across channels like email, web, and social.View full definition →: which body owns your licence, which body owns the words, which body owns consumer law, and how those remits divide up in Great Britain, Australia and the United States.

Three remits, one advert

Every energy marketing claim is read by up to three kinds of authority, and each asks a different question.

Licence conduct regulation. A sector regulator issues the supply or retail licence and attaches conditions to it. The question is: does your behaviour, including how you sell, breach the terms you signed to be allowed to trade at all? The sanction is a licence penalty or, at the far end, revocation.

Advertising content regulation. A code body reads the advertisement as a consumer would read it and asks whether the overall impressionimpressionThe total number of times an ad or piece of content is displayed, regardless of clicks. Each display counts as one impression, even to the same person.View full definition → misleads. It does not care much whether the underlying product is lawful. The sanction is withdrawal of the ad plus a published ruling with your brand on it.

General consumer law. A competition or consumer agency asks whether the conduct misleads or harms consumers across a market, using law that applies to every sector. The sanction is court action, undertakings, or civil penalties that can dwarf the other two.

Most compliance failures in energy marketing come from a team that satisfied one of these three and assumed it had satisfied the others.

Great Britain: Ofgem owns the licence, the ASA owns the message

Ofgem (the Office of Gas and Electricity Markets) licenses gas and electricity suppliers in Great Britain and enforces the standard licence conditions attached to that licence. Standard Licence Condition 0, the Standards of Conduct, requires suppliers to behave in a fair, honest, transparent and professional way towards domestic customers, and it explicitly covers information given during sales and marketing. Ofgem's enforcement decisions run to sums in the tens of millions of pounds for serious failures, published on Ofgem's enforcement decisions page. Northern Ireland has its own Utility Regulator; Ofgem's writ stops at the Irish Sea.

The Advertising Standards Authority enforces the CAP Code for non-broadcast advertising and the BCAP Code for broadcast, the latter under powers contracted out by Ofcom since 2004. Section 3 covers misleading advertising and puts the burden of substantiation on the advertiser before the claim runs. Section 11 covers environmental claims. The ASA's test is what a reasonable consumer takes from the ad, including from the qualification in the small print, which must not contradict the headline.

The consumer law layer sits with the Competition and Markets Authority, whose Green Claims Code (2021) sets out what an environmental claim has to be: accurate, clear, complete on relevant information, fair in any comparison, and substantiated. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 the CMA can enforce consumer protection law directly rather than only through the courts.

Where this bites in practice is REGOs, the Renewable Energy Guarantees of Origin certificates that Ofgem administers. A supplier can buy REGOs separately from the electricity it actually delivers, satisfy Ofgem's scheme rules in full, and still lose an ASA ruling because the advert implied the electrons reaching the customer's house were renewable. Ofgem judged the certificate. The ASA judged the impression.

Australia: the ACCC carries two of the three remits

Australia splits the map differently. The Australian Energy Regulator administers the National Energy Retail Law and the retail pricing rules, including the reference price that retail offers in most eastern states must be expressed against. That is the licence layer.

The advertising and consumer law layers are largely one body. The ACCC enforces the Australian Consumer Law, where section 18 prohibits misleading or deceptive conduct and section 29 prohibits false or misleading representations about price, performance and benefits. There is no Australian equivalent of the ASA for truthfulness: the self-regulatory ad complaints body handles taste, decency and targeting, while a misleading claim goes to the ACCC or straight to the Federal Court.

Two consequences follow. First, there is no cheap ruling as an early warning. In Britain an ASA adjudication costs you the campaign and some embarrassment; in Australia the first formal response to the same claim may be proceedings. Second, the money is on a different scale. Maximum penalties for corporate breaches of the ACL are the greater of A$50 million, three times the benefit obtained, or 30% of adjusted turnover during the breach period.

Green claims are an active ACCC priority. Its 2023 internet sweep found that more than half of the businesses reviewed were making environmental claims the ACCC considered concerning, and it published guidance for business on environmental claims in December 2023.

United States: federal deception law plus fifty state licensing regimes

There is no federal energy supply licence. Retail electricity and gas competition exists only in the states that deregulated, and in those states the public utility commission licenses retail suppliers and sets marketing and door-to-door rules. A campaign running in Texas, Pennsylvania and Ohio answers to three different commissions with three different rulebooks.

The national layer is the Federal Trade Commission, which enforces Section 5 of the FTC Act against unfair or deceptive acts or practices. Its Green Guides (16 CFR Part 260) tell advertisers how the FTC reads environmental claims, including claims based on renewable energy certificates, and a review of those guides has been open since 2022. State attorneys general enforce their own deception statutes in parallel and are often faster off the mark than the FTC.

There is no pre-clearance body and no ASA equivalent. Broadcast networks clear their own advertising, and competitors challenge each other through self-regulatory review rather than a public watchdog. The practical effect: a US energy claim is usually tested by a rival or a state AG, not by a regulator monitoring the market.

🎬 [VIDEO: "How the ASA regulates advertising in the UK" - https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ASA+advertising+standards+authority+how+it+works - an explainer on the ASA's complaint-to-ruling process, useful for understanding timelines before a campaign launch]

Where the remits overlap, and where they contradict

The overlaps are deliberate. Ofgem regulates the product and the supplier's conduct. The ASA regulates the communication. The CMA and the ACCC regulate the harm. A claim can pass one gate and fail the next, and no regulator is obliged to defer to another's view.

That has one hard consequence for how sign-off works. Approval from a regulatory affairs team that reads licence conditions is necessary and not sufficient, because that team is answering Ofgem's question, not the ASA's. Somebody has to read the ad the way a consumer would, and the best training for that is past ASA adjudications in the energy category, which are public, searchable and far more predictive than the code text.

For multi-market campaigns, the asymmetry matters more than the wording. The same green tariff line drafted for Britain, where the first challenge is likely to be an ASA complaint, lands in Australia where the first challenge may be a penalty proceeding, and in the US where it may be a competitor challenge in one state and nothing at all in another.

Key Takeaways

• Three remits, three questions. The licence regulator asks whether you breached the conditions of trading. The ad code body asks whether this specific ad misleads. The consumer law agency asks whether the market was harmed. Ofgem, the ASA and the CMA split those questions in Britain; the ACCC holds two of them in Australia; the FTC and the state commissions split them again in the US.
• Being Ofgem-compliant does not make you ASA-compliant. A valid REGO-backed "100% renewable" tariff can still be ruled misleading if the advert implies more than the certificate delivers.
• The cheap early warning is a British luxury. An ASA ruling costs you a campaign. An ACCC action is priced against turnover.
• In the US, jurisdiction is a map of states. Retail energy licensing sits with state commissions, so a national campaign is not governed by a single rulebook.
• Precedent beats policy. Reading actual rulings in the energy category predicts risk better than reading the code.