Greece drafts rules requiring data centers to source 60% of power from renewables

Greece's Ministry of Environment and Energy has proposed draft legislation requiring data centers to source at least 60 percent of their power from renewables. The obligation would sit with the facilities and their operators, not with the country's generation mix as a whole. The draft is out for consultation until October 24, 2026.

Alongside the sourcing target, the ministry proposed a €200,000 ($224,089) per megawatt bank guarantee for data centers seeking a grid connection, intended to keep speculative applications out of the connection queue. The guarantee scales with the size of the request: a 100MW connection would imply €20 million in bank guarantees before construction starts.

Data center investors would also have to prove sufficient financial backing and investment readiness before reserving grid capacity, and would be required to cover grid connection and related grid reinforcement costs. Projects connecting to the transmission system would face financial capacity checks, including turnover criteria.

The draft includes flexible grid connection agreements for locations with insufficient capacity, allowing grid operators to limit how much power a facility draws from the grid within set limits. Transmission and distribution operators would publish available connection capacity by region every three months. The Regulatory Authority for Waste, Energy and Water (RAAEY) would create a data center registry to track sector developments and improve transparency.

Separately, the proposals set out a €2.3 billion ($2.57 billion) Island Decarbonization Fund to finance projects that reduce reliance on oil-fired generation in favor of renewable energy and storage facilities.

The draft follows Spain, which proposed legislation in August requiring data centers to source at least 80 percent of their electricity consumption from new renewable generation on an hourly basis. The coverage does not say whether Greece's 60 percent figure would be measured hourly or annually. That distinction matters to how developers contract for supply: hourly matching requires generation shaped to the facility's load profile, while an annual test can be met with certificates bought in bulk.

Greece remains a small data center market by European standards, though it has expanded. Data Center Map counts 29 operational facilities across 19 operators in the country, and Digital Realty launched its first Greek data center on Crete, according to the report.