Over the last decade, the EU has become a cleantech innovation powerhouse, investing billions of euros and developing most of the technologies we need to decarbonise, become energy resilient and build industrial leadership. However, we still struggle to scale and industrialise these technologies in Europe, especially when they are developed by newcomers. At the critical “scale-up” stage, cleantech companies typically need to shift from raising tens of millions of euros in venture capital to validate their technology,  to hundreds of millions of euros in debt instruments to build large-scale plants.

To remain competitive in the global cleantech race, the EU urgently needs an ambitious Cleantech Investment Plan that can unleash billions of euros in private and institutional capital to fund the industrialization of key technologies. We have gathered insights from Europe’s cleantech ecosystem to identify the bottlenecks and offer solutions that can catalyze the step change needed to make Europe a cleantech industrial leader.