ESG & Sustainability teams at Electricity & Power firms operating under digital infrastructure environmental impact and data-centre energy reporting are increasingly using AI to contextualise data-centre offtake exposures in climate transition-plan disclosures, draft regulator-facing policy briefs on digital-infrastructure energy obligations, and prepare due-diligence briefings on PPA counterparties with data-centre offtake concentration.
The OECD's 2025 Revision of the Recommendation on Digital Technologies and the Environment carries a named, citable statistic on Ireland's data-centre share of metered electricity, drawn from Ireland's Central Statistics Office, that ESG & Sustainability teams at electricity and power firms will reach for when populating sustainability disclosures, ESG investor responses, and regulatory briefings on digital-infrastructure environmental impact. That statistic is exactly the kind of figure the RLB Specialist Panel tested two frontier AI subjects against.
The RLB Specialist Panel issued a Specialist Panel application-style question on the share of Ireland's 2021 metered electricity that data centres accounted for, per the figure cited in the OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024 chapter referenced by the 2025 Recommendation, sourced from Ireland's CSO (2023). Two frontier AI models tested by the RLB Specialist Panel returned the figure as 14 per cent and extended the answer with a four-point time series running from 5 per cent in 2015 through 21 per cent in 2023. The regulator's verbatim text records 11 per cent in 2021, with no multi-year trajectory.
The failure class is Fabricated Fact: a confidently delivered, citably attributed statistic that does not match the source document, compounded by a fabricated time series that does not appear anywhere in the OECD or CSO published record.
For ESG & Sustainability teams at electricity and power firms, this is operationally consequential because the wrong figure is not a vague paraphrase. It is delivered with a real source chain, CSO 2023 via OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024, that survives standard reference-check review. AI tools tested by the Panel stated that data centres accounted for 14 per cent of Ireland's metered electricity in 2021, citing Ireland's Central Statistics Office via the OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024, when the Recommendation's own text gives the figure as 11 per cent.
The AI compounded this by generating a fabricated time series, 5 per cent rising to 21 per cent across 2015 to 2023, that appears nowhere in the source material, giving the wrong anchor figure a false air of corroboration. For an ESG and Sustainability team at an Electricity and Power firm, this figure is live material: it is exactly the kind of OECD benchmark used to contextualise a firm's data-centre offtake or grid digitalisation footprint in climate transition plan disclosures, regulatory submissions on digital infrastructure energy obligations, or due-diligence briefings on PPA counterparties.
A three-percentage-point error on a jurisdiction the OECD has explicitly named, carried into a board sustainability report or a regulator-facing policy brief, creates both a factual mis-statement to retract and a process credibility question the team will need to answer.
The audit's finding on this question is published with an immutable RLB Citation ID. The relevant entry is RLB-H-INT-OECD-OECD-DIGITAL-TECHNOLOGIES-ENVIRONMENT-2025-Q006-Sonnet46. The full audit is published at the OECD Digital Technologies and the Environment Recommendation (2025 Revision) hub on RegLegBrief.com.
This is the consolidated view of findings. Click the Citation IDs or 'see details →' on any item for the full details for each finding.
AI tools we tested stated that data centres accounted for 14% of Ireland's metered electricity in 2021, citing Ireland's Central Statistics Office via the OECD Digital Economy Outlook 2024, when the Recommendation's own text gives the figure as 11%. The AI compounded this by generating a fabricated time-series (5% / 14% / 18% / 21% across 2015–2023) that appears nowhere in the source material, giving the wrong anchor figure a false air of corroboration.
For an ESG & Sustainability team at an Electricity & Power firm, this figure is live material: it is exactly the kind of OECD benchmark used to contextualise a firm's data-centre offtake or grid digitalisation footprint in climate transition plan disclosures, regulatory submissions on digital infrastructure energy obligations, or due-diligence briefings on PPA counterparties. A three-percentage-point error on a jurisdiction the OECD has explicitly named, carried into a board sustainability report or a regulator-facing policy brief, creates both a factual mis-statement to retract and a process credibility question the team will need to answer.
Every finding on this page compares an AI subject's account of the rule against the regulator's verbatim text from the regulator's own portal. Both are linked. Each delta, its root causes, and impact analysis are documented and published with immutable Citation IDs.