Attributing Electricity-Related Greenhouse Gas Emissions to Real Water Losses in Greek Water Utilities Using Regulatory Reporting Data

Abstract

Water lost from distribution networks has already consumed electricity, but the associated greenhouse gas burden is rarely quantified, because water balances and organizational emission inventories use different boundaries. This study links the two within the Greek managerial-adequacy framework for a purposive sample of eight utilities and 14 utility-year observations (2024–2025). Electricity supply points are classified by activity and the attribution is graded, which isolates water-supply electricity from organizational totals that other activities can dominate: in one island municipality, fugitive emissions from solid-waste disposal make up 94% of the declared total. Water-supply energy intensity ranges from 0.538 to 2.434 kWh/m3 and operational carbon intensity from 0.198 to 0.895 kg CO2eq/m3 of system input. Under proportional average-intensity allocation, reported real losses carry 22.0–67.5% of each utility’s water-supply electricity emissions, or 2708 t CO2eq in the 2025 cross-section. These are accounting allocations from top-down water balances, not measurements of leak-specific energy use. A conditional screening shows that leakage reduction overlaps European public-investment carbon values only under stated unit-cost assumptions, and that the carbon case weakens as the grid decarbonizes while the water and electricity savings do not. The results support activity-level electricity reporting and the joint consideration of leakage, energy intensity, and system scale when mitigation measures are prioritized.