Svenska kraftnät launches data.svk.se – Sweden’s energy data portal, built on open standards

Svenska kraftnät (SVK) is Sweden’s transmission system operator, equivalent to EirGrid in Ireland. In 2025, SVK selected Derilinx to design and build a new open data portal for Sweden’s electricity market. That portal, SVK Data Service, launched publicly at data.svk.se in June 2026, and it is a project we are genuinely proud of.

SVK Data Service is not a standard data portal, and it is worth explaining why.

Many open data portals do exactly what they say on the tin: they make files available for download. SVK’s ambition went further. From the outset, the goal was data that other systems can find, fetch and understand, without manual mapping or bespoke integration work on the receiving end. That means a developer or data scientist querying the platform should be able to trust that the data is self-describing: the values explain themselves, the concepts are formally defined, and nothing requires a phone call to SVK to interpret correctly.

“The data is no longer just machine-readable, it is now also machine-understandable, semantically interconnected, and ready to be integrated into global data networks.”

The platform is built on Derilinx’s CKAN platform, the open-source foundation behind many of Europe’s leading national data portals, and implements full support for Linked Open Data, a set of W3C standards that give data not just a format, but a meaning. It is the difference between publishing a spreadsheet and publishing knowledge. SVK’s own introduction to the thinking behind the platform is a good place to start if the concept is new to you.

In a traditional data API, a value like bidding_zone: SE2 is just a text string. A machine receiving it has no way to know what SE2 represents, how it relates to other bidding zones, or whether it means the same thing as a similar field in another dataset. Integrations end up depending on tribal knowledge, and when definitions change, everything downstream breaks quietly.

Working alongside SVK’s domain experts, Derilinx helped build custom ontologies and controlled code lists that give every concept in SVK’s data a permanent, globally unique web address. SE2 is no longer a string, it resolves to a formal definition, with its full name in Swedish and English, its place in the bidding zone hierarchy, and its relationship to surrounding concepts. The same applies to reserve products like aFRR and FCR, price units, reserve directions, and every other repeating concept across SVK’s datasets. If a regulatory change affects how a concept should be understood, SVK issues a new term in the ontology rather than silently overwriting the old one, so datasets referencing different versions of a definition never get mixed up.

Large tabular datasets (procured volumes, capacity market prices, reserve activations) are made machine-understandable using the W3C CSV on the Web (CSVW) standard, which attaches a semantic schema directly to the data. The tables stay as tables, but the meaning travels alongside them. Developers who want plain JSON can still get it; those who want to load the data into a knowledge graph or graph database can do that too, using the same API response. SVK’s blog goes deep on both the ontology and code list design and the CSVW implementation and API responses for anyone who wants the technical detail.

A data portal only delivers value if people can find what is on it. The platform describes its catalogue using DCAT-AP-SE, Sweden’s national profile of the EU DCAT-AP standard, and exposes it for automated harvesting. That means SVK’s datasets flow automatically to Sweden’s national data portal, dataportal.se, and from there to the European Data Portal, data.europa.eu.

Document a dataset once on SVK’s own platform, and it becomes discoverable nationally and across Europe, complete with its categories, multilingual descriptions, and machine-readable licensing terms. A European energy researcher looking for Nordic bidding zone time series does not need to know SVK exists, they will find the data directly through the European portal. For organisations building energy analytics tools or AI models on top of open data, the machine-readable licence declarations mean systems can automatically evaluate whether they have the rights to use a dataset, without any manual legal review. SVK’s post on how the harvesting chain works in practice explains the full flow from Sundbyberg to Brussels.

For the energy sector, this is what good looks like: standards-based, interoperable, and built to connect rather than to sit in isolation. Energy data does not respect national borders, transmission system operators across Europe work on the same underlying grid, and the ability to combine SVK’s data with equivalent datasets from other TSOs, without a bespoke integration project for each pairing, is genuinely valuable. Because SVK’s ontologies are built on open W3C standards, they can be connected in future with European frameworks like the Common Information Model (CIM) or data from ENTSO-E. The groundwork for that cross-border interoperability is already in place.

Open data, linked data and DCAT are what Derilinx does. Working with Svenska kraftnät to deliver data.svk.se has been one of the most technically ambitious projects we have taken on, and a strong example of a public body publishing data the way the open data community has long advocated.

The API standards cover the technical side of sharing data. They do not address who owns a dataset, or whether two bodies use the same definition for the same field. Those questions belong to the Data Sharing Standards Framework, published alongside the API standards in November.

You need both, and you need them together. Build the API before agreeing who owns the data and what its fields mean, and the API will faithfully move data that means one thing in the first body and something else in the second.

If you are scoping a data-sharing project, writing a procurement specification, or reviewing APIs you already operate, we are happy to talk through what the standards mean for your organisation.

SVK Data Service Screenshots