Agenda

Rise & Restore: Early Morning Yoga

Welcome Coffee

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

Registration & Help Desk

Stop by to collect your badge or ask a question at any time during the day.

The Age of Electrification, Security and Resilience

Cleantech Group and guests will reflect on how things stand as we head towards 2027 – where’s capital, what’s working, what’s not and what are the key go-forward trends to pay attention to.

Can Europe (Still) Produce Global Cleantech Winners?

The goal is not to create European startups. The goal is to create global market leaders. Are we building companies for Europe, or building companies from Europe?

A timely discussion in a much changed and highly-charged geopolitical context.

Co-hosted by: European Investment Bank

You Have 10 Seconds. Make Them Count

Live Pitch Coaching with Beth Susanne | Only 8 Places

Beth Susanne is a Global Pitch Coach from Silicon Valley, now based in Sitges, who has coached more than 4,000 founders and teams across 60+ countries, whose companies have collectively raised over $10 billion.

In this highly interactive, one-hour session, eight participants will each have the opportunity to:

• Deliver a two-minute pitch about their company, technology or investment opportunity.
• Receive immediate, personalized feedback on what works, what doesn’t and what needs to change.
• Learn how to capture attention, communicate value, and make investors and partners want to know more.

Only 8 places are available. Additional 15 to 20-minute individual coaching sessions will be offered throughout the day for participants seeking focused feedback on their specific pitch or communication challenge.

Reserve your place through the event app, or contact forums@cleantech.com.

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.

Reindustrializing Europe through Cleantech

Reindustrialization has become one of Europe’s defining economic priorities, with the Net-Zero Industry Act, the Clean Industrial Deal, and energy security concerns all pointing toward building more of the clean economy locally. Getting there means turning first-of-a-kind projects into bankable, repeatable industrial assets. In this session, InnoEnergy is joined by leaders from its portfolio companies to discuss where European cleantech manufacturing is gaining ground, what’s struggling, and what they’re watching for the future.

Co-hosted by: InnoEnergy

Networking Break & Mental Re-Set

During this break (and the afternoon break), in the spirit of a retreat, you have the opportunity to join Dr Myriam Oliver, Psychologist and Integrative Therapist, for a 20-minute “Mind, Body & Rituals for High Achievers” reset session, starting at 11:15 AM.

Drop in to Macabeo room during this break for guided breathing, grounding, a short meditation and some simple rituals to reset and regain clarity and presence.

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’s DSX framework is laying the groundwork for whole-of-system flexibility, starting from the rack level out. Innovations are happening across the cleantech ecosystem in energy-efficient chips, photonics, and compute workload orchestration that will create step-changes in power efficiency and flexibility potential.

In this session we’ll discuss the data center flexibility imperative, how Nvidia is setting the stage for flexibility, and how adjacent compute innovations will set the stage for AI growth with lower resource impacts.

Cleantech 50 to Watch Innovation Showcase: Powering the Energy Transition

Each year, the Cleantech 50 to Watch recognizes the companies with the potential to shape the next chapter of the energy transition. In this session, four of this year’s honorees will present their technology, traction to date, and plans for scaling.

TerraFerno Geothermal Solutions, Aqua-Cell Energy, FeX Energy, and Green Graphite Technologies each bring a distinct approach to decarbonizing power and strengthening energy security. Together, they offer a snapshot of where the sector is heading: more resilient, more flexible, and less dependent on carbon-intensive supply chains.

The 2026 Cleantech 50 to Watch report is now live! Download it here

What the EIB Can Do For You!

How can the EIB help cleantech companies turn innovative technologies into investable and scalable businesses? Meet EIB representatives to explore the range of financing and advisory support available to European cleantech companies, including venture debt, working capital guarantees and project development support.

This session will be helpful for post-Series A cleantech companies looking to demonstrate their technology or scale up, particularly those seeking support with investment readiness, funding capex/RDI (> €30m) over next 3 years, or with significant working-capital needs (> €20m) linked to production/sales ramp-up.

Co-hosted by: European Investment Bank

Innovation Showcase: Beyond the Pilot

Getting a cleantech solution to market is hard. Scaling it is harder. This innovation showcase spotlights later-stage startups that have moved beyond proof of concept and are now building the commercial track record, supply chains, and partnerships needed to grow at pace.

Each company will present its technology, the traction it has secured with customers and partners, and its plans for expanding. With proven technology and real-world results behind them, these companies are ready for the next stage of growth, and are looking for strategic partners, customers, and capital to get there.

Lunch

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

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.

Want to lead a conversation? Submit your topic ideas here!

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.

This event is sold out. To see if there is a last minute opening, contact forums@cleantech.com

Dual Use, Single Agenda – The Emerging Cleantech & Defense Nexus

Until now, European cleantech has been defined by climate ambition: cutting emissions, reducing resource use, and shifting to alternatives. That mission remains, but it now shares the stage with another. More and more, the technologies that decarbonize and support climate resilience are also the ones that defend. Domestic energy, secure raw material supply, and chemicals and materials made closer to home serve civilian and military buyers alike. As defense budgets grow and investors revisit long-standing exclusions, we look at how innovators are building for a dual-use market, and what it takes to win on both fronts.

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.

The Exits We Need for the Materials and Chemicals Sector

Chemicals and materials startups face a timing problem that few other venture categories do: scale-up takes longer and costs more than a typical fund cycle allows, and exits remain rare. That puts the spotlight on strategic acquirers, licensing deals, and private equity, but what do those buyers actually want to see, and when should founders start positioning for them? In this session investors and M&A advisors from Capricorn and Natrium Capital will share how exits in this sector actually come together, from the technical and commercial milestones that move valuations to the deal structures that bridge the gap between startup risk and corporate appetite.

Co-hosted by: Capricorn Partners

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.

Afternoon Break & Ask the Experts

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.

Mental Re-Set

During this break, in the spirit of a retreat, you have the opportunity to join Dr Myriam Oliver, Psychologist and Integrative Therapist, for a 20-minute “Mind, Body & Rituals for High Achievers” reset session.

Drop in to Macabeo room during this break for guided breathing, grounding, a short meditation and some simple rituals to reset and regain clarity and presence.

Venture Capital & Term Sheet Clinic for Investors and Startups

Whether you are an investor looking to deploy capital in Europe or a startup preparing for your next funding round, this interactive and practical clinic is designed for you. Join four partners from 2 leading international law firms as they share insights into the latest fundraising trends, valuation developments, term sheet negotiations, investor expectations, exit strategies and other key issues shaping today’s venture capital market.

The session will combine market insights with hands-on discussion of the terms and structures that can make a real difference in successful financing transactions. Participants will have the opportunity to gain practical perspectives from experienced advisors who work on venture capital deals across Europe on a daily basis.

Co-hosted by: Taylor Wessing and Winston Taylor

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.

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

Women in Cleantech Breakfast Discussion

Start your day with an energizing conversation among the women driving innovation across cleantech and sustainability.
Join Women in Cleantech and Sustainability (WCS), a global nonprofit community advancing women working across climate, energy, and sustainability, for a breakfast discussion with founders, investors, corporate leaders, and policymakers. Together, we’ll have an open, candid exchange about their experiences, the challenges and opportunities facing the sector, and how we can better support women in cleantech.

Co-hosted by: Women in Cleantech & Sustainability (WCS)

Welcome Coffee

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

Registration & Help Desk

Stop by to collect your badge or ask a question at any time during the day.

Green Molecules: Re-Assessing Their Role in the Road Ahead

Such is the constant noise, you’d be forgiven for thinking AI and data centers is the only industrial activity that matters and that electrons and electrification was now regarded as the solution for everything. Just as hydrogen’s potential as the “Swiss army knife” of decarbonization was totally overdone across 2022-23, ignoring gases, fuels and molecules today and their role in the future energy mix would likewise be a mistake. In a highly changed world from 2-3 years back, our guest speakers will help us re-assess the size and role of green molecules in the road ahead, providing their insights and their lived experience of investing in such technologies and the challenges in scaling such innovative new technologies.

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.

Cleantech 50 to Watch Innovation Showcase: Innovations in Industrial Processing

Join us for a special session featuring several of this year’s honorees, who will share what they’re building, the breakthroughs behind their technology, and the challenges they’re navigating as they scale. A chance to hear directly from the founders and leaders shaping the future of climate tech, and to connect with the innovators on this year’s list.

The 2026 report is now live! Download it here.

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.

Morning Break

Building an Independent Minerals Supply Chain: Where is Europe Starting from? Where to Next?

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

The world’s energy landscape is shifting fast, and the companies driving that change are often the ones rethinking where power comes from, how it’s stored, and who gets to access it. In this session, three emerging leaders take the stage to share the technologies and ideas shaping a cleaner, more resilient energy future.

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: New Chemistry for Old Industries

This showcase features three companies developing new materials and chemical processes for industries that have relied on the same solutions for decades. Each one is changing how essential materials are made and doing it in ways that fit into existing industrial operations, cutting cost, waste, or hazardous inputs along the way.

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.

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.

The ‘So What’: Our Top Takeaways from the Week, and What they Mean for 2027

Members of the Cleantech Group team will share what they see as the most critical outcomes from this Forum, and their expectations for how the next 12 months will unfold until we all meet again in 2027. This informal closing session will invite anyone in the room to share their own too.

Farewell Drinks

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