National allocation briefing
Where Greece's water goes
8,785 million m³ a year, from aquifers and rivers, through three systems, to the people who use it. 8 litres in ten irrigate crops. Hotels and data centres draw from the public mains, not the aquifer — so they never appear in the abstraction ledger. The hatched blocks are the part of the picture the public record lets you check act by act: 58,787 water-use licences, 3,307 million m³/yr of ceilings, 2011–2026.
Eurostat env_wat_abs, Greece 2022. The full source → system → user flow is drawn on wider screens.
Inside the hatched blocks: 58,787 licences, one point each
Every granted water-use licence since 2011, placed by the annual ceiling it allows. 48,231 farm licences cluster around 3,162 m³/yr; 1,221 irrigation-network licences (ΓΟΕΒ, ΤΟΕΒ, co-ops) sit far to the right and carry 52% of the volume. Hospitality's 237 points look like households. The lone data-centre licence sits inside the farm band.
x = m³/yr, log scale · dark tick = median of the lane · hover a lane label to isolate the sector · points are placed from the per-sector volume histogram (0.1 log bins); no act is omitted.
Where the licences are
46,168 acts carry usable ΕΓΣΑ87 coordinates in their text (letterhead coordinates repeated across a directorate are excluded). Each dot is a 3 km cell, coloured by its dominant sector. The Thessaloniki plain, Thessaly and the Serres basin are green; Attica and the islands turn purple and pink.
Licensed volume by directorate
- Central Macedonia1,500 M · Collectives 76%
- Epirus502 M · Collectives 56%
- Crete453 M · Municipal 54%
- East Macedonia & Thrace303 M · Farms 52%
- Attica129 M · Municipal 45%
- West Macedonia124 M · Farms 56%
- West Greece96.0 M · Farms 36%
- Peloponnese94.8 M · Municipal 44%
- Sterea Ellada31.6 M · Municipal 29%
- South Aegean28.4 M · Municipal 58%
- North Aegean20.2 M · Farms 39%
- Thessaly16.4 M · Farms 36%
- Ionian Islands8.2 M · Municipal 64%
Central Macedonia alone licenses 1,500 M m³/yr — 45% of the ledger — almost all of it through two irrigation-network acts. Island directorates license little groundwater and lean to municipal supply and households.
Twelve years of licensing, as a stream
Million m³/yr of ceilings granted in each decision year, stacked by sector. The 2016 bulge is one act — the Thessaloniki-plain network's 900 M m³/yr renewal. Read the width as licensing activity, not consumption.
Labels: million m³/yr licensed that year. Thessaly has no acts in 2026 (directorate reorganisation — a coverage floor, not zero licensing).
Who gets told no
Of every hundred decided applications, how many were refused. Households 2.3, hospitality 1.2, farms 0.7, irrigation networks 0.1. A rate, not a cause — directorate, year and whether the borehole already existed all move it; see the confounders in Refusal patterns.
Hotels and data centres: on the mains, not in the aquifer
Hospitality holds 237 licences for 7.3 M m³/yr — 0.2% of the ledger, refused 7 times in 572 decisions (578 acts name a hotel, resort, villas, golf or camping operator). Data centres hold one: 2,220 m³/yr in ΚΡΩΠΙΑΣ for landscaping. The water they actually use comes through ΕΥΔΑΠ and the ΔΕΥΑ, permitted by ΑΕΠΟ, and the utilities publish no split by customer.
Hospitality licences by directorate
Data centres — the permit trail
21 data centres operate at 44 MW; 8 projects hold grid connection for 547.5 MW, 507.5 of it in Attica; ~3 GW is queued (ΑΔΜΗΕ reply to Solomon, spring 2026; ΑΔΜΗΕ via Solomon; Fthiotida, Boeotia, Kozani, Thessaloniki, Evros). Cooling water for the halls is mains supply — no water-use permit is required (ΚΥΑ 146896/2014).
What a data centre would draw — and where the next ones are headed
Left: the ministry's own method (ΥΠΕΝ data-centre water report, June 2026): IT load × 8,760 h × 90 % × water-usage effectiveness. Right: where ΑΔΜΗΕ/ΔΕΔΔΗΕ have room to connect them by 2034 (PwC siting study for the government, unpublished), drawn over the abstraction licences already on the ground.
Cooling-water calculator
80 MW × 8,760 h × 90 % = 631 GWh/yr of IT energy
Selected: evaporative (industry avg.) → 1.20 M m³/yr. Household 417 m³/yr and irrigation 600m³/στρέμμα are the ΥΠΕΝ report's own equivalents.
Method and coefficients: ΥΠΕΝ (Αλ. Κουλίδης), 'Κέντρα Δεδομένων και κατανάλωση νερού στην Ελλάδα', 20 Jun 2026 — via Solomon. The one Greek act with a declared figure, Microsoft ATH04 (19.2 MW IT), states 8,856 m³/yr — cooling only on days above 29 °C; see Data-center siting.
2034 grid headroom for data centres vs. where water is already licensed
Circle = MW available for data-centre connection in 2034, inner figure = largest single site (PwC Stream II via Solomon; regions are not summable) · dots = abstraction licences. Thessaly and W. Macedonia hold the most grid room; the ΥΠΕΝ report names Thessaly as the aquifer that cannot take new boreholes.
How long a licence takes
Median days from the latest application to the decision, where the act states both dates (68,595 of 108,934 acts, 63%). Grant on the blue dot, refusal on the red; the longer the bar, the bigger the gap.
How the figures were read
Sector and volume are not fields on Diavgeia. Each act's PDF was converted to text and parsed; every value traces to its ΑΔΑ. The national frame is Eurostat's; the data-centre figures are the ministry's and the grid operators' own documents.
Hydroelectric abstractions (81 licences, 1,288 M m³/yr) are flow-through and sit outside every total. 13 volumes above 50 M m³/yr for a single private point are excluded as presumed typos; 37 large single points are kept as stated.
Sector is read from the act subject first, then the use line in the body, then the stated use. Coordinates: 46,168 usable of 108,934; a value repeated 25+ times in one directorate is a letterhead, not a borehole, and is dropped. Every count is a floor of what Diavgeia holds; application dates were found on 63% of acts.
Sources: Diavgeia OpenData, acts of the 13 regional Directorates of Waters, 2011–2026 · Eurostat env_wat_abs (2022, fetched 2026-10-13) · ΥΠΕΝ data-centre water report and PwC grid-capacity study, both obtained by Solomon (Sep 2026). Applicant names and ΑΦΜ are never displayed. Method: Methodology & verification.