Can the EU Data Act help to keep data-driven business models in Europe?

It would not be wrong to describe Niklas Bärk as an employee of a craft business. After all, his company Greenflash plans, builds and operates photovoltaic systems on behalf of commercial customers. And yet, says Bärk, the core of his success is something completely different: data. “In order to serve our customers optimally, we need a large amount of data,” says the chief technologist of the start-up from Lingen an der Ems. Greenflash controls the entire power supply on the company premises for a medium-sized metal processing company from northern Germany: Bärk’s people record the electricity generated by solar cells and the entire consumption in the company in real time, i.e. all machines, the connected combined heat and power plant and the charging park for electric cars.