Agenda

Rise & Restore: Early Morning Yoga

Breakfast

Fuel up and ease into the day. A relaxed breakfast to reconnect with fellow attendees before the program kicks off.

Opening Plenary

The full forum convenes. Setting the stage for the day’s themes and signaling the conversations that matter most to the ecosystem right now.

Europe’s Geothermal Opportunity: Unlocking Investment Across the Value Chain

Recent geopolitical events have resurfaced the challenges of Europe’s over-reliance on volatile fossil fuels and its dependency on foreign resources to support energy systems. Next-generation geothermal systems can provide a pathway to generate low-carbon, cost-effective power. Europe has the potential to unlock 301 TWh of electricity using enhanced geothermal technologies – equivalent to roughly 42% of EU coal- and gas-fired generation. This session will cover a brief overview of the types of innovators in geothermal, where there are investable opportunities across the value chain, and what needs to happen to further de-risk technologies to ensure wide-spread scale up.

No Cool Down: The Business Case for Heat Resilience

As record temperatures redefine risk across Europe’s built environment, energy infrastructure, and workforce, this session examines the fast-emerging market for heat resilience technologies, from thermal management materials and cool urban surfaces to occupational heat monitoring and demand-side grid solutions. With extreme heat now a recurring operational reality rather than a tail risk, the pressure on asset owners, utilities, and city planners to act is intensifying. Drawing on perspectives from major demand-side players actively rethinking infrastructure resilience and innovation procurement, the session will map where the market is forming, where capital is moving, and what it will take to close the gap between available technology and deployment at scale.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Networking Break

Energy & Compute

The ambitions of data center build-outs are already facing constraints from power supply and interconnection queues, flexibility will be one of the central leverage points to reducing power requirements of advanced AI. Nvidia is laying the groundwork for whole-of-system flexibility, starting from the rack level out. Alongside advancements in AI components, Nvidia is creating an ecosystem of flexibility, including the new DSX reference framework, that will create opportunities for innovation in flexibility software and hardware across the value chain.

In this session we’ll discuss the data center flexibility imperative, how Nvidia is setting the stage for flexibility, and how the innovators, investors, and corporates in the room can be a part of the new, flexible future in AI compute

Circularity by Mandate: Navigating the EU EPR Landscape

The EU’s expanding Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) framework has shifted circularity from a voluntary goal to a legal obligation for companies operating in the region. This session looks at what’s actually working when it comes to recovering and reusing critical inputs, and where design choices are making products easier to disassemble and recycle. We’ll get into the technical, commercial, and policy barriers still holding progress back, and where investment and partnership opportunities are emerging as companies adapt their supply chains to these new requirements.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Fireside Chat

This session will pair a moderator with a leading voice in cleantech — a founder, investor, policymaker, or industry executive — for a candid, one-on-one discussion on the trends, decisions, and lessons shaping their work. Expect less polish and more substance: real talk on what’s working, what isn’t, and where the sector is headed next.

Grid Flexibility in the AI Era

The gap between power demand and supply continues to accelerate as high-demand sectors electrify and hyperscaler growth outpace expectations. Elsewhere in the forum we’ll be discussing the energy mix that’s going to be required to meet this generational growth in demand, but even with growth in clean power supply, grid flexibility will be essential to realizing power requirements of the electrified and AI age without raising costs in other parts of the economy.

In this session we’ll exchange perspectives on AI for grid control, short and long-duration storage, grid flexibility and resilience innovation,and debate the strategies that corporates, investors, and innovators in the room should take to navigate a world where every corner of the grid needs to become more flexible.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Electricity and Industrial Decarbonization: How Far Can It Go?

While originally intended as decarbonization vectors, technologies to electrify heavy industry’s high-heat processes now have potential to act as a hedge against fossil fuel volatility. Iberia has provided some of the world’s first cases in how thermal energy storage can act as a predictable source of industrial process heat.

In this session we’ll exchange perspectives on the various electrified approaches – thermal energy storage, industrial heat pumps, electrical production of steel & cement – to transforming heavy industry.

Lunch

A proper break to recharge, debrief the morning sessions, and make new introductions over a shared table.

Set Sail: Sailing Tour Along the Sitges Coast

Leave the shore and the boardroom behind, and discover Sitges from its most breathtaking vantage point: the open sea. This is networking reimagined, where the backdrop is the sparkling Mediterranean and the agenda is as open as the horizon. Because the best deals, ideas, and partnerships don’t always happen at a desk. Sometimes they happen at sea.

Spaces are limited. Reserve yours during the registration process.

Peer-Driven Table Topics

Some of the best ideas come from candid, off-the-record conversations with peers facing the same challenges. This interactive session breaks attendees into small roundtable groups, each centered on a specific topic proposed and led by a fellow participant — from scaling clean technologies and navigating project finance, to corporate-startup collaboration and policy shifts shaping the market.

Come ready to listen, contribute, and leave with new perspectives and a few new contacts from across the cleantech ecosystem.

Ask the Expert Stations

Rather than sitting through a formal presentation, attendees are free to move between stations, ask pointed questions, and dig into the topics most relevant to their business or interests. It’s a low-pressure, high-value format designed for candid conversation, quick problem-solving, and one-on-one connections with experts you might not otherwise get time with.

Stop by with a specific question in mind, or simply browse the stations to see where the conversation takes you.

FOAK Pitch Competition

This pitch competition puts the spotlight on companies working to deploy their first commercial-scale facilities — from novel materials and industrial processes to next-generation energy infrastructure — and the capital, partnerships, and de-risking strategies needed to get shovels in the ground.

Judges will offer live feedback, and the audience will get a rare look at the deal-making challenges, and opportunities, behind bringing capital-intensive climate technologies from pilot to full-scale reality.

Afternoon Break

Closing the Gap: Long-Duration Storage for a High-Renewables Grid

AI load growth and rapid renewables build-out have exposed a timing problem the grid wasn’t built for: abundant power at midday, scarcity after dark. The events of April 2025 sharpened Iberia’s focus on storage, inertia, and resilience on a high-renewables grid. Long-duration storage is playing a material role in the growth of renewables in Iberia, with new technologies deploying faster than in most of the world.

In this session we’ll exchange perspectives on the competing chemistries and architectures – iron-air, flow, CO2, thermal storage, pumped hydro – which durations actually matter for which problems, and the market structures needed to make LDES bankable. It will bring together storage innovators, the utilities and industrial off-takers who would deploy them, and the financiers deciding whether the economics hold.

Networking Reception

Reconvene and wind down the afternoon program with a lively reception — a chance to follow up on the day’s conversations in a relaxed, informal setting.

A Taste of Sitges: A Guided Tapas Tour

Breakfast

Recover, refuel, and ease into the morning with fellow attendees before the final day gets underway.

Capsule Keynote

A focused, high-impact keynote to anchor the closing day — distilling the signal from the noise and pointing toward what comes next.

Quantum in Cleantech

As energy demand for advanced AI continues its relentless growth, clean power alone will be unable to keep pace and supply to all hyperscalers’ ambitions. Energy efficiency at point of compute will be one of the most impactful ways to draw down energy requirements of advanced AI.

At a moment when needs evolve beyond AI training to high amounts of inference processing, new AI accelerator chips, innovations in photonics, and new materials for semiconductors will have enormous multiplying effects on energy efficiency. This session will involve discussion and debate over the level to which new compute approaches can bend the curve on energy consumption, and by when.

New Waters: Desalination’s Role in Europe’s Water Security

Water stress is accelerating across southern Europe and the Mediterranean, and a new generation of European innovators is repositioning desalination from last-resort infrastructure to a scalable, modular water security tool. As drought frequency increases and traditional supply sources come under sustained pressure, the question is shifting from whether desalination belongs in Europe’s water mix to how fast it can be deployed, at what cost, and by whom. Bringing together innovators, regulators, and project developers, this session maps where the most compelling technology is emerging, who is driving deployment, and what is reshaping project economics across the region.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Morning Break

Powering the AI Buildout: Data Centers, Gas Prices, and the Race for Clean Firm Power

The coming wave of AI data centers has brought with it clean firm power constraints, permitting battles, and new public opposition that’s likely to last. In addition, the speed-to-power race has raised the demand for natural gas for power, at a time when European natural gas prices are still roughly 4x U.S. gas prices.

The answers will lie across a mix of fast-to-deploy renewables: long-duration energy storage, efficiency in data center cooling, and eventually new sources of clean firm power (geothermal, nuclear fission, fusion). This discussion will bring together innovators in new technology for data centers (and the investors backing them), data center operators, and the financiers making large-scale data center and power co-location a reality.

Dear EU: No Minerals, No Transition

Europe’s dependence on a handful of countries for the minerals underpinning its energy transition, defense, and digital economy has become impossible to ignore. China’s export controls have turned a long-standing vulnerability into an active supply shock, and Europe is scrambling to respond in real time. The EU’s answer, anchored by the Critical Raw Materials Act, sounds ambitious on paper, but the reality on the ground looks different: financing gaps, slow permitting, and processing capacity that doesn’t yet exist. This discussion examines what it will actually take to build mineral supply chains that can withstand what’s already underway and where innovation has a chance to speed things up.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Physical AI in Energy & Materials

Penetration of AI into business and process optimization is happening at a rate faster than Internet adoption did. However, many heavy industries are now finding opportunities to leverage AI-enabled robotics to drive down cost and accelerate scale. Perhaps more importantly, those innovating in new materials and chemistries are now able to leverage physical AI for fast iteration and quick experimentation, compressing the timeline toward material commercialization. This session will involve those both developing and adopting physical AI technologies for materials, and we’ll invite audience comment (and debate!) on the level to which physical AI will impact materials-based industries.

Scaling Fusion: Capital, Collaboration, and What Comes Next

As Europe faces an ongoing energy crisis, fusion can provide a pathway for long-term sustainable power if successfully scaled. Currently, multiple companies are making progress in Europe and a few companies are leading the way. This discussion will be centered around what are the key factors enabling companies to secure funds at these critical stages, how are they identifying partners for strategic growth and what could future fusion power plants look like.

Innovation Showcase

Get a front-row seat to the next wave of climate innovation. Four rising cleantech startups take the stage to pitch the technologies and business models set to accelerate the transition to net zero. Each founder will share their vision, the problem they’re solving, and the traction they’ve built so far — all in a tight, high-energy format designed to spark investor interest and industry connections.

Whether you’re an investor scouting early-stage opportunities, a corporate looking for partnership potential, or simply curious about what’s next in climate tech, this session offers a concentrated dose of the ideas and entrepreneurs driving the sector forward.

Lunch

A final shared lunch — a natural moment to reflect on the forum and tie up any loose threads before the afternoon closes things out.

Has the H2 Bubble Truly Burst? Building an Iberian Hydrogen Economy

While the global hydrogen economy faces teadwinds, Spain has emerged as one of Europe´s leading green hydrogen ecosystems actively building out electrolyzer capacity, infrastructure, and hydrognen-to-methanol pathways.What has changed since the hydrogen bubble burst (or, arguably, deflated), and where are the opportunities for an Iberian green hydrgen economy?

The Burning Question: Can Innovation Keep Pace with Europe’s Wildfire Crisis?

From the Mediterranean basin to the Iberian Peninsula, longer fire seasons, faster-moving blazes, and expanding wildland-urban interfaces are exposing the limits of traditional wildfire detection, suppression, and land management approaches. This session brings together innovators, infrastructure operators, insurers, and investors to examine where technology is changing the response calculus, how capital is being deployed and repriced in response to rising fire risk, and what a more resilient European landscape actually requires.

Town Hall Discussion

The full forum reconvenes for an open, community-wide conversation — surfacing shared themes, unresolved questions, and collective commitments to carry forward.

Farewell Drinks

Raise a glass to three days of extraordinary conversation. A warm send-off to close The Cleantech Retreat — until next time.