How SMEs Can Drive Europe’s Green Transition and Boost Competitiveness

At the SME Assembly 2025 in Copenhagen, a clear and urgent truth emerged: Europe cannot meet its climate commitments without fully mobilising its small and medium-sized enterprises.

While the EU aims to cut emissions by 90% by 2040, the bloc’s 23 million SMEs—representing 99% of all businesses and around 40% of Europe’s emissions—remain structurally disadvantaged in the green transition. Their decarbonisation challenge is not merely technical or financial; it is systemic.

During the opening of the session “No Net Zero Without SMEs,” moderator Karen Clements, Deputy CEO of LOW Associates, laid out the problem in stark terms. Compared with large companies, SMEs face weaker cost-reduction incentives, smaller grants, less structural support, and significantly fewer internal resources to manage the transition.

These obstacles form a structural gap that policy ambition alone cannot bridge. The real test now lies in implementation: whether the EU’s expanding frameworks can meaningfully help small businesses adopt clean technologies, reduce their bills, and strengthen their resilience.

This tension—between ambition and feasibility—framed the perspectives of three voices shaping Europe’s cleantech landscape: Keylany Hassine, CEO of ISTYA and Young Energy Ambassador for the EU; Laima Balčiūnė, CEO of Sunrise Tech Park and Head of Cleantech Lithuania; and Paul Robbrecht, Senior Expert at POM Antwerp and coordinator of the LIFE WeShare project.

Their testimonies offered a view of Europe’s climate transition from the ground up, where innovation is practical, local, and immediately measurable.

How ready-to-use innovation can unlock Europe’s wasted energy potential

Keylany Hassine opened the discussion with a blunt reminder: SMEs want to decarbonise, but they simply lack the manpower, expertise, and time to manage it. Most have no sustainability teams at all. The solutions must therefore be “plug-and-play”—easy to deploy, affordable, and immediately effective.

ISTYA, the company he leads, has built its model around this principle. Its indoor air quality sensors monitor environmental parameters—temperature, humidity, and CO₂ among others—and feed them into AI-optimised systems that automatically adjust heating, ventilation, and cooling.

The effect is immediate: lower consumption, reduced emissions, and improved air quality. This technology has been validated in major environments, including one of ISTYA’s flagship deployments, the Olympic Village in France, illustrating that scalable, lightweight optimisation tools can operate even in the most complex infrastructures.

But perhaps even more revealing was ISTYA’s internal transformation. Through the European project SU 5.0, the company redesigned its own sensors with a decarbonisation-first approach. The outcome was emblematic of what many SMEs could achieve: a 50% reduction in carbon footprint coupled with a 40% increase in product margins.

This was achieved through design simplification, material optimisation, enhanced recyclability, and the strategic decision to shift manufacturing to local SMEs, cutting logistics emissions while strengthening regional value chains.

Hassine reinforced the scale of the opportunity with a striking statistic: two-thirds of all energy in buildings and industrial facilities is wasted. For many SMEs facing rising energy costs and inflation, these inefficiencies represent one of the most immediate and cost-effective levers available to them. Yet without support structures, most lack the capacity to act.

His final recommendation served as a practical roadmap: the creation of a centralised EU platform dedicated to ready-to-deploy decarbonisation solutions for SMEs.

He also urged businesses to consult a specific guide co-published by the European Commission and the Solar Impulse Foundation, which compiles practical energy-efficiency use cases—an accessible tool for SME leaders overwhelmed by the complexity of the transition.

From energy communities to cleantech clusters: building Europe’s resilient industrial ecosystems

If ISTYA represents optimisation at the scale of individual businesses, the interventions of Laima Balčiūnė and Paul Robbrecht highlighted how Europe is developing broader ecosystems capable of transforming entire industrial regions.

Balčiūnė presented Lithuania as a case study in rapid ecosystem acceleration. The country now counts over 1,200 start-ups—seven times more than five years ago—supported by structures such as Sunrise Tech Park and Cleantech Lithuania.

These organisations operate across two major pillars: cleantech, greentech, and climate tech (through the Cleantech Lithuania cluster), and digitalisation (through the European Digital Innovation Hub).

One of the standout initiatives is the Green GRID programme, part of the Euroclusters framework. It supports SMEs by funding energy audits, digitalisation assessments, and a tool often overlooked in European industrial policy: structured collaboration with Transmission System Operators.

With grid congestion emerging as a critical barrier to renewable expansion across Europe, this cooperation enables SMEs to address infrastructure limitations that would otherwise block their deployment of clean technologies.

Balčiūnė framed the issue in broader terms:

In a geopolitical climate increasingly marked by supply shocks and energy volatility, the ability of SMEs to participate actively in the energy system is becoming a cornerstone of Europe’s strategic autonomy.

The conversation then shifted to Antwerp, where Paul Robbrecht detailed the emergence of industrial energy communities—shared energy ecosystems tailored for SMEs in business parks.

Under the LIFE WeShare project, POM Antwerp is developing a model based on a simple but powerful sequence: efficiency first, energy sharing second.

Each business begins by reducing its own energy waste through audits and optimisation. Only then do the companies engage in local energy exchange, balancing production and consumption to reduce both costs and dependence on external suppliers.

The financial logic is compelling. SMEs participating in an energy community can benefit from the roughly €100 per MWh spread between locally shared energy and grid-delivered electricity.

This advantage applies to both producers and consumers, with a portion reserved to fund community operations and ensure long-term viability.

As the discussion closed, each speaker was asked to identify the one most impactful action that could support SME decarbonisation.

Hassine advocated for a single platform offering accessible solutions; Balčiūnė called for stronger protection of European cleantech innovators to prevent local value creation from being undermined by low-cost imports; Robbrecht highlighted the need for regulatory stability to scale energy communities, while insisting that efficiency improvements at the individual SME level must always come first.

It will be built across thousands of business parks, workshops, labs, and campuses—through technologies that simplify, ecosystems that empower, and frameworks that support the smallest actors in the economy.

Europe has the innovation, the talent, and the ambition. What remains is the capacity to transform complexity into accessibility, aspiration into implementation, and policy into action.

The future of the green transition will unfold not in grand declarations, but in the everyday decisions of SMEs—because the path to net zero runs straight through them.

By Dorothée Oké, journalist