"It’s critical to achieve climate neutrality in Europe, but even more important to scale up and export solutions to help decarbonize the rest of the world.” --Luís Rebelo joins Cleantech for Europe

Cleantech for Europe’s mission is to bring together cleantech leaders and EU policymakers to create the conditions for economic competitiveness. Our efforts to ensure that a new generation of European industry thrives means working closely with policymakers from across the political spectrum and mobilising many stakeholders, including the VC investors and scaleups in our coalitions.

To further sharpen our advocacy strategy, Luís Rebelo has joined our team as Policy Manager, while also leading the policy efforts of our sister initiative Cleantech for Iberia. An experienced professional in legislative procedures and negotiations, Luís formerly worked at the European Parliament for over five years as a Parliamentary Assistant, where he developed deep expertise on climate and sustainability policy. During that time, Luís supported the Cleantech Friendship Group in the European Parliament.

Luís has substantial academic experience, having completed two master’s degrees, and he is currently pursuing a PhD in Management, with a sustainability focus. He brings strong knowledge of national and European policy making along with political experience and a strategic and data-driven perspective. His expertise in stakeholder management, negotiation, strategic planning, and understanding of national and EU legislative processes will help us advocate for the most ambitious policies to support the emerging cohort of European cleantech champions.

What motivated you to join Cleantech for Europe?

This is a natural step in my career, as after working on the public policy side, I wanted to contribute to tangible changes in an area that I find critical to European economic growth: the fight against climate change.

I’ve always been interested in innovation and technology. When I started working as a senior policy advisor at the European Parliament the spaces that could merge innovation, sustainability and technology immediately caught my eye. From there, I began collaborating with the Cleantech FriendshipGroup, where I first encountered Cleantech for Europe. It was clear from the outset that we shared the same goal of pushing for European clean technologies and industries as a bridge to economic growth while fighting climate change.

We have a unique chance, in the cleantech space, not only to say, but to prove that economic growth and fighting climate change are not incompatible, but rather complementary.

Looking ahead to the coming months of the new political mandate, what are some key areas to focus on?

We are at the start of an absolutely crucial legislative cycle for not just the cleantech sector, but the future of European industry more broadly. The European Commission is now working on a range of important topics, with the Clean Industrial Deal at the top of it, and we’ve been analyzing the reality for sometime now. We’ve read and we discussed the Letta and the Draghi reports and now we know better what Europe needs to change: we need a laser focus on competitiveness and a more business-oriented and pragmatic approach.  It is not through deindustrialization that we will achieve any of our goals. Rather, we must build the business case for technologies that can decarbonise European industry.

European companies are paying much more, sometimes even triple, for energy than some of our global competitors. We need to bring energy costs down – and for such we need the Energy Union to be a reality. Now is the time to invest and build the interconnections that have been delayed for more than a decade.

We also need to be more assertive towards the rest of the world. Europe needs to affirm itself in the global panorama and speak louder when talking about defending Europe, our industry, jobs and prosperity. And we need to do it fast and with concrete moves, ensuring, at least, reciprocity from other players. Climate and trade diplomacy are becoming more divisive. As much as we defend free trade, we cannot have free trade without reciprocity, that’s the essence of free trade. It would be like running a marathon with a broken leg. Having the right trade policies in place to protect our industry is critically important.

Finally, we must keep in sight that this isa double race: a race to the top in terms of industry, and a race to the bottom in terms of emissions. Europe accounts for around 6% of global emissions. This said, it is critical to achieve climate neutrality in Europe, but it is even more important to create, scale up and export the solutions that will decarbonize the rest of the world.

Are there any concrete measures you see as critical to advocate for going forward?

There are several areas I can mention. On trade, for example, we must be smarter and bolder. We need to fight unfair competition from companies from other countries. We need to send strong demand signals to support European lead markets and fair competition for local producers.

On investments, we need to improve our capital markets union, we need to make Europe attractive to investors and diversify our capital stack, is it VC, blended finance, public guarantees, debt or other solutions. And we need to make Europe more prone to risk; this is particularly true for the institutional investors required to attract more venture capital investments and bridge th einvestment gaps we have. There is a role for public institutions to play–without directly investing public money. For example, public guarantees can unlock private investments we need.

But we can go further. In 2026 revision of the European TS we should aim for the inclusion of negative emissions. The inclusion of negative emissions in the ETS will increase the investment in carbon removal technologies – which we already know are critical for us to achieve climate neutrality in 2050 and to limit global warming to 2.0 degrees over preindustrial levels, as stated by the UNFCCC. Carbon removal technologies, which are expensive now, can flourish with access to clean energy and a leap forward in the demand for removal units of CO2 provoked by the inclusion in the ETS.

We cannot Europe fail to scale strategic clean technologies, or we will lose our technological edge and see our competitors reap the jobs and prosperity that the cleantech revolution will create.

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You’re based in Portugal, which has become a clean energy powerhouse. Are there any insights you’d like to share from Portuguese context that are relevant for the rest of Europe?

There is a socialand political consensus about the energy transition inPortugal, which allowed the country to be a frontrunner in many technologies.For instance, in 2024, 71% of the energy consumed in the county was from cleanand renewable sources. But we are also moving on decarbonizing industry.Portugal recently opened a call to strategic investments for a decarbonizedeconomy with over 1 billion euros of funding, focusing on key technologies suchas electrolysers, heat pumps, batteries and CCUS, among others.

Portugal is increasingly able to attract industry and leverage its abundance of clean energy, skilled labour force, public support for the energy transition and increasingly attractive tax regime. The availability of renewable energy also makes Portugal less dependent on natural gas and more resilient to energy crisis or conflicts such as the one with Russia. We have the right conditions to attract more and more cleantech companies and to establish ourselves as ago-to country for cleantech investments.

You’ve been working at Cleantech for Europe and Cleantech for Iberia since November. Are there any highlights so far in your tenure you’d like to share?

Sure! In Cleantech for Europe I would say that the opportunity to be at the forefront of the discussion of the Clean Industrial Deal has been an amazing opportunity to contribute to a more competitive, industrialized and decarbonized Europe. Coming from the European Parliament, I am very much used to the legislative process and able to contribute at a later stage, when the files get to Parliament. At Cleantech for Europe, we get to contribute earlier, and in close contact with the innovators and investors, representing their voices in the process. We work closer to the innovators and to the industry, also closer to the people who are in fact working daily for Europe to remain competitive and to deploy the novel technologies we need!

At Cleantech for Iberia, I can highlight two important moments: the initiative’s second appearance at the leading tech conference the Web Summit, during which I had the chance to moderate a panel on making Iberia a clean industrial hub. This was a great opportunity to show how Portugal and Spain have the conditions to become industrial leaders. I would also recognize our first Cleantech for Iberia coalition meeting in Portugal, which took place inLisbon in December. We invited a large number of stakeholders, with over 30 organizations at the table, to discuss financing Iberia’s cleantech ecosystem.Those were two moments in which we felt that our daily work means a lot to the local ecosystem and that we are on the right track!

Thanks for sharing your insights, Luís. It’s great to have you aboard.

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