Ahead of the 20th edition of European Sustainable Energy Week, we sat down with Paloma Aba Garrote, Director of CINEA – which organises the event – to reflect on the event’s journey over the years and discuss what to expect from this year.
Now in its 20th edition, European Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) has become the defining annual gathering for Europe’s clean energy community. It is a space where policy ambition meets practice, and where the people driving the continent’s clean energy transition come together. This year’s event takes place in hybrid format in Brussels and online from 9-11 June 2026, where registrations are open now.
Ahead of the milestone edition, The Innovation Platform spoke with Paloma Aba Garrote, Director of the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA), about what two decades of EUSEW reveal about Europe’s energy journey — and what comes next.
How valuable is the Policy Conference at EUSEW to CINEA, both in terms of sharing an agenda, and also hearing from the many stakeholders involved in sustainability policy? Is it a two-way street between researchers and policymakers, for example?
The EUSEW Policy Conference is less a Commission event that stakeholders are invited to and more a community gathering that the Commission hosts. That distinction matters enormously to me personally, because it shapes how CINEA and the Commission approach our role: less as organisers setting an agenda, and more as conveners creating the conditions for a conversation that the community itself drives.
In practical terms, this means the programme is built from the ground up each year through an open call for session proposals. The applications we receive reflect what practitioners are grappling with, where researchers see gaps, what local authorities need from European policy. But the connections extend well beyond the formal sessions: all registered participants have an online profile on the EUSEW interactive platform and use it to arrange bilateral meetings. People come together at the Energy Fair, connect over coffee, continue a debate over lunch. The event has a gravitational pull that the programme alone does not explain.
Marking two decades of this is something CINEA takes seriously, and we are proud to have contributed. EUSEW has become the largest annual clean energy event in Europe – a trajectory I hope reflects community growth as much as institutional momentum. This anniversary edition will honour that with a fireside chat titled ‘Powering Change: 20 Years of European Clean Energy Transition’, bringing Commissioner Jørgensen together with four of his predecessors on 9 June, also broadcast online: Kadri Simson, who held the energy portfolio from 2019 to 2024; Miguel Arias Cañete, from 2014 to 2019; Günther Oettinger, from 2010 to 2014; and Andris Piebalgs, from 2004 to 2010. I think it will be one of the most valuable exchanges of the week. As with all EUSEW sessions, it will be available to both in-person and online participants. The programme is already available online, and registrations are open.
The Young Energy Ambassadors (YEAs) are playing an increasingly prominent role in EUSEW. How does CINEA work with the early-career leaders of Europe’s green transition, and what more needs to be done?
The Young Energy Ambassadors programme has a history that is worth telling, because it illustrates how an evolving institutional focus on youth can turn an experiment into a programme with its own brand. EUSEW launched the European Youth Energy Day in 2020 to bring young voices into the conversation. The response was strong enough so that by 2022 it had grown into a year-round programme, with 30 Ambassadors selected annually for a mandate that runs for an entire year. The 2025 call drew more than 1,300 applications for those 30 places. CINEA has supported the European Commission in building a programme that justifies that demand. In 2025, a YEAs-led session — ‘Net-zero or net-hype? Rethinking European cities’ — put greenwashing and practical urban sustainability solutions squarely on the main conference agenda. They also took part in policy workshops with European Commission officials, where they shared their perspectives on current policy questions. And for those earlier in their careers, ‘Jobs and Skills clinics’ during the conference breaks offered something more immediate: CV feedback, career guidance, and honest conversation about the skills the clean energy sector actually needs.
Young Energy Ambassadors are regular authors of opinion editorials published by EUSEW media partners. I admire their rigour and how their analysis sits alongside that of senior officials and industry leaders, not in a dedicated youth section. I have also seen former Ambassadors return as attendees, as speakers, and even as policy session organisers.
I think the priority now is normalising the expectation that young energy professionals are not only the future of this field but are already actively shaping it, and EUSEW is the right space for this intergenerational dialogue to flourish.
The ‘SMEs Driving Energy Efficiency’ Award is also rising in prominence at EUSEW as it was the new award category introduced in 2026. Have these smaller organisations been overlooked in the past, and how do they factor into the transition?
The ‘SMEs Driving Energy Efficiency’ Award is new this year, but the recognition to this specific policy area is long overdue. If you look at the EUSEW Awards history, particularly the former Innovation category, a striking share of the most compelling applications have consistently come from smaller enterprises. Companies with 10 or 20 people, operating in a specific region, solving a specific problem, and finding solutions that larger organisations simply had not thought to look for. The new category makes the acknowledgement explicit.
The three finalists announced in this category on 5 May are Ener2Crowd, RE-LEAF, and Water Horizon. They revealed business and financing models that make energy upgrades genuinely reachable. The public will now have a say in which of the finalists take home the Award: an online vote is open until 31 May, with the winner announced at a ceremony in Brussels on 9 June 2026. The affordability dimension of the clean energy transition is where SMEs are often doing the most creative and consequential work.
EUSEW is a conference. How much of a role do conferences and real-life events have in CINEA’s communication strategy?
Events are an important element of CINEA’s overall communication strategy. They serve as powerful platforms for connection, knowledge sharing, and relationship-building. Every community needs a place to convene, and that is how we perceive EUSEW. The hybrid format exists precisely because we do not believe physical attendance should be a prerequisite for participation. The Policy Conference sessions are fully accessible online, and last year once again some 10,000 people joined from across Europe and beyond without coming to Brussels. That reach is part of what makes EUSEW a genuinely European event rather than a Brussels gathering with a European label.
EUSEW also extends well beyond the June conference week. Through the Sustainable Energy Days – locally organised events running from March to June, registered under the EUSEW label – the community takes the conversation into cities, regions, and sectors across Europe and worldwide. The call to earn the ‘Sustainable Energy Day’ title is live until 24 May 2026. For readers considering whether this is relevant to their work: it almost certainly is.
The Energy Fair at EUSEW is always a melting pot of ideas, with contributions from researchers, private enterprise, industry, and policy. How important is this element of EUSEW, where people get to mingle?
There is a phrase I keep coming back to when talking about the Energy Fair: the difference between knowing about something and having embodied this knowledge through experience. You can read a project summary, watch a video, scroll past a LinkedIn post, and still not grasp what a technology actually does until you are standing in front of the person who built it.
The Fair is where EUSEW closes that gap. This year, it is fully integrated within the Charlemagne building in Brussels for the first time. Attendees will be able to move easily between a plenary session and a stand demonstration.
What strikes me is how much of the exchange happens laterally and how it is not something we at CINEA could have ever programmed as part of the conference agenda. The Policy Conference sessions create shared frames of reference, and the Fair is where those frames get tested against reality. Both are necessary, and EUSEW 2026 brings them closer together than they have ever been.
What is your favourite energy technology milestone?
It is, genuinely, an impossible question — and the more I learn, the more convinced I become that technological and social innovation go hand in hand. And this is also what EUSEW Awards categories ‘Women in Energy’ and ‘Local Energy Action’ spotlight, because EUSEW has long understood that implementing a technology without a creative social infrastructure is impossible.
That said, if pressed, a great example of what technology can achieve is last year’s EUSEW Innovation Award winner – AQUABATTERY. Its saltwater flow battery uses table salt and water as its core materials: locally sourced, non-toxic, and free of the critical raw material dependencies that make so much of our current storage infrastructure strategically vulnerable. What struck me was not just the elegance of the solution, but what it represents: a European energy storage technology built from European materials.
What are your hopes for the next 20 years of EUSEW? What sessions for the Policy Conference do you anticipate being submitted from the EUSEW community in 2036 or 2046?
20 years of EUSEW themes read almost like a political biography of European energy policy. The early editions were very aspirational, placing great emphasis on the idea that collective change begins with an individual action. By the time the Energy Union arrived in 2015, the focus of many policy conference sessions had shifted to architecture: how do we build a system, not just change behaviour? The Clean Energy Package of 2018 brought a different kind of language to the conference agenda and the official event theme: not ‘support the transition’ but ‘lead it’.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reframed clean energy as a security imperative in a way that years of climate argument had not quite managed to do. The theme for 2026, ‘A clean, secure and competitive Energy Union’, reflects a policy environment that has had to hold all these pressures simultaneously.
What I hope for the next 20 years is that the work being done today – on flexibility, on storage, on sector integration, on making the transition affordable for households and businesses that cannot absorb the upfront cost – becomes infrastructure that nobody thinks about because it simply works. I would like to see a EUSEW 2046 that is grappling with the next generation of questions, because the current ones have been resolved.
How important are media partners and other supporters in facilitating important meetings of minds?
The media wall has become something of an institution — at some point, attendees decided that this is the place to take selfies and that is something we have leaned into ever since. I am not here to speak about the structural challenges that quality journalism has been facing, but I can reflect on how the role of media has increased for EUSEW in recent years.
The community that gathers in Brussels each June is large and vocal. What we at CINEA are prioritising is that the conversations remain ongoing throughout the year through the blog contributions, op-eds, and other publications by matching the expertise of all different partners. EUSEW wasn’t designed this way – this has gradually developed, driven by the people who have joined the event. Social media matters, but to me it is still journalism and specialist media which carry the conversations that happen at EUSEW further than the event itself.
Finally, how much do you enjoy EUSEW? As the Director of CINEA, what do you get (personally and professionally) from the Energy Fair, the Policy Conference, the various awards, and from the general energy at the event?
Yes, it is my job to be there, but I go for the spark and for the belonging: to see what others are up to, to soak in their creativity and innovation, and to feel that we are not alone in this work. Each time, EUSEW reminds me that there is a critical mass of people across Europe for whom the clean energy transition is a daily commitment. Experiencing that sense of belonging is the kind of energy boost that everyone working on energy, environment, and climate genuinely needs and rarely gets.
Professionally, what I take away is usually a clearer read on where the field is heading than any briefing document gives me. Personally, I leave with more optimism than I arrived with. For a director whose work is largely institutional, that is not a small thing.
Note: On 5 May, six other finalists were announced in the other two EUSEW Awards categories: Women in Energy – Donna Gartland, Dr Nadia Horstmann, Suzanne Renard; and Local Energy Action – 100 Projects Phasing Out Gas, MultiHome , Nova Energia Osona. The public vote to select the winners is open until 31 May.
The European Sustainable Energy Week (EUSEW) is the biggest annual event dedicated to renewables and efficient energy use in Europe. #EUSEW2026 marks the 20th edition and will once again bring together the community of people who care about building a secure and clean energy future for the next generations.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 26th edition of our quarterly publication.
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