Today, sustainability is part of almost every business strategy. Companies publish ESG reports, set climate targets and work to reduce their environmental footprint.
But more than 25 years ago, those conversations barely existed. For Henning Kirkegaard, sustainability wasn’t a trend – it was a responsibility.
When he founded Dansk Scanning, later WebLager, he built the company on three principles: create solutions that benefit society, reinvest profits to secure long-term growth, and never let growth come at the expense of the environment.
Those values shaped every major decision.
Seeing the challenge early
While studying engineering at the Technical University of Denmark in the 1980s, Henning learned about rising CO₂ levels and the growing evidence of climate change. He became convinced that businesses had to become part of the solution.
As WebLager expanded, so did its energy consumption. More customers required more servers, and more servers required more electricity. Rather than accepting that as the price of growth, Henning asked:
“How can we continue growing without increasing our environmental impact?”
The answer came in 2000. Henning proposed investing 11 million DKK in a wind turbine – a decision his bank called one of the craziest investments they had ever encountered. They refused to finance it. Another bank said yes.
When the turbine generated its first kilowatt-hour on 20 November 2000, it marked the beginning of WebLager’s transition from simply consuming energy to producing its own. A few years later, despite still repaying the first turbine, the company invested in a second. The motivation wasn’t short-term profit but long-term responsibility.
Building a more sustainable infrastructure
Renewable electricity was only part of the solution. WebLager reinvested an entire year’s profit in ground-source heating powered by its own wind energy and later added solar heating for hot water production. When the company built new facilities years later, Henning faced another challenge: the server rooms produced large amounts of excess heat, but no commercial recovery system existed. So he designed one himself. The system stores surplus heat underground during summer and reuses it to heat the buildings in winter, turning waste energy into a valuable resource.
A long-term perspective
Many of the solutions WebLager invested in – wind power, ground-source heating, solar energy and heat recovery – were considered unconventional at the time. Looking back, the story isn’t just about sustainability. It’s about acting on long-term conviction before the rest of the world catches up. Those decisions continue to shape WebLager today, not because the company followed a trend, but because it believed in doing the right thing long before sustainability became standard practice.
In Chapter 3, we’ll explore how WebLager is using technology, innovation and long-term thinking to continue improving its environmental impact – from renewable energy and smarter infrastructure to solutions that help customers become more sustainable.
