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Dec 2025
Denmark is becoming the first country to unify district heating data through Center Denmark’s national HeatSync platform, and the Icelandic company Klappir is among the first to tap into it. With real-time, building-level data now seamlessly available, municipalities can move from reporting emissions to actively reducing them.
As organisations face rising pressure to cut emissions, optimise operations, and document their environmental footprint, one barrier consistently slows the transition: the absence of accessible, high-quality data.
Klappir, the Icelandic-born sustainability software company, has been tackling this challenge for a decade. But according to its Chief Business Development Officer, Thorsteinn Jonsson, something transformative happened when they entered Denmark.
“Heating and utility data have always been locked away in local silos. Getting it was painful, fragmented, inconsistent, and sometimes impossible. Center Denmark is the first place we’ve seen that actually solves this,” he says.
What makes Denmark different is simple and profound: a national, neutral platform where utilities can feed data and companies can access it through one unified interface. For Klappir, whose entire business model depends on granular, real-time resource data, it is nothing short of a game-changer.
Klappir offers a platform that lets companies and municipalities monitor their electricity, water, waste, fuel, and heat consumption at the building level and by the week, day, or hour. This turns sustainability reporting into a byproduct of operational insight, rather than an isolated compliance exercise.
“If we want to reduce emissions, we have to be extremely thorough. We need to spot the bad stuff and the good stuff. And the only way to do that is high-quality data,” Jonsson says.
But until now, heating data, a major part of Denmark’s environmental footprint, has been the hardest to access. Each municipality or company had to request monthly totals from one or more of the more than 400 local heating utilities. Often, those numbers arrived on PDF invoices, giving only a single figure for an entire month.
“A monthly number is fine for a report. But it tells you nothing about operations. Nothing about what’s broken, what’s wasteful, what’s running overnight. Without granular data, everything becomes guesswork,” Jonsson explains.
Klappir needed something different: time-series heating data, recorded every 15 minutes, building by building, meter by meter. And that is exactly what Denmark is now enabling.
Klappir is one of the first companies to integrate with HeatSync, the Center Denmark–led initiative that brings district heating data from hundreds of utilities into a single, national, open-access hub.
“To my knowledge, this is the first time anywhere that segregated heating utilities are combining into a single database. Not even Iceland, which is famously digital, has achieved this,” Jonsson says.
For Klappir, this integration enables access to real-time heating data at both the building and meter levels, from utilities across the country, through a single unified connection.
The effect for Danish customers is immediate: when municipalities open Klappir’s dashboard, electricity, waste, fuel, and now heating data appear seamlessly integrated in one place.
“This is going to be a complete game changer. Instead of hunting for data, municipalities can finally act on it,” Jonsson says.
Because municipal budgets are consumed by energy, water and waste, operational insight becomes a direct driver of climate impact and cost savings.
In Jonsson’s view, Denmark’s approach works because someone decided to pull the system forward.
“The utilities weren’t pulling the wagon. Denmark was pulling the wagon, bringing everyone together with the right ambition and mindset,” he says.
Across Europe, heating and water utilities remain deeply local, usually connected only by geography, not technology. Coordinating them is difficult, time-consuming and politically sensitive.
But in Denmark, the pieces aligned:a strong digital identity framework, political support, a tradition of public–private collaboration, and a neutral institution, like Center Denmark, trusted by all sides.
The result is something rare: a truly national dataset for one of the hardest sectors to digitalise.
“Everyone will benefit. We will benefit by sourcing high-quality data for our customers. But it’s open. Anyone with the right technical capability can connect,” Jonsson emphasises.
This aligns perfectly with Klappir’s mission to liberate sustainability data from siloed systems and make it useful, traceable and actionable across organisations.
For Jonsson, the shift from annual or monthly totals to continuous, granular data is the difference between symbolic sustainability and real sustainability.
“If you want next year’s emissions to go down, you need to know what actually happens inside your buildings today. Without data, you’re just guessing, and you risk investing heavily in things that don’t matter,” he warns.
With Center Denmark’s data infrastructure, Klappir can now help public and private organisations: find malfunctioning equipment, identify heat loss, compare buildings like-for-like, benchmark suppliers, measure the real impact of new technologies, and make sustainable procurement decisions based on evidence, not assumptions.
“Daily operations hold huge untapped potential for emission reduction. But you only see it when the data is liberated,” Jonsson concludes.
With Denmark’s unified data layer and Klappir’s operational sustainability tools, a new model is emerging: one where organisations don’t just report their climate ambitions, but finally have the insight to achieve them.
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