A few weeks ago, I talked about the Series B gap – the $13.5 billion shortfall that is quietly costing Europe its own climate champions. That piece was about financing. This one is about something bigger.

At World Fund, we’ve just published Europe’s Power Play, developed with Kaya Partners and the NATO Innovation Fund. It’s the report that matters most right now – not just for climate tech, but for anyone who cares about what kind of continent Europe becomes in the next decade.

The argument is straightforward, even if the implications are not. Europe is losing control of the inputs that define whether it can shape its own future: energy, industry, critical materials, and compute. Natural gas import dependency sits at 85.6%. Manufacturing has fallen to 14.3% of EU GDP, well below the bloc’s own 20% target. Europe’s share of global data centre capacity has dropped from over 25% in 2015 to 15% today. In 2025, BYD alone produced more battery electric vehicles than the entire European automotive industry – the birthplace of the automobile.

These are not abstract statistics. They are the consequences of decades of choices that made sense in isolation and left Europe exposed collectively.

What the report does – and what I think makes it different – is to reframe the conversation. Brussels has spent years talking about resilience. But resilience is reactive by design. It asks how we absorb the next shock. The more important question is how we rebuild the power base that prevents it.

And here is where it gets interesting for anyone in climate tech: the technologies that restore Europe’s power are the same technologies that decarbonise it. Clean energy generation cuts emissions and anchors cheap, domestically controlled supply. Battery recycling breaks China’s grip on critical materials and closes the loop on a polluting supply chain. Strategic autonomy and climate action don’t pull in opposite directions — they converge on the same companies, the same investments, the same capital allocation decisions.

The commercial evidence is already in the market. Octopus Energy has reached a $9 billion valuation. IQM Quantum Computers is going public at $1.8 billion, the first European quantum company to list. Porsche and Bosch have invested in cylib. Airbus has backed Quantum Systems. These aren’t philanthropic gestures – they are corporate balance sheets voting for European deep tech under existential competitive pressure.

That pressure is, counterintuitively, an opportunity. The report puts the total addressable market across these four power-critical sectors at $35 trillion by 2030. The companies building into that opportunity are being built right now. The question — as it was in the Series B piece — is who finances them, and whether enough of that capital stays European.

Three things need to happen. Venture capital must scale to match the ambition: Europe produces 18.1% of all global scientific publications but spends just 0.17% of GDP on venture capital, versus 0.75% in the US. Policy must accelerate deployment, with procurement used as a demand signal and permitting timelines compressed. And Europe must back the specific technologies that restore its power — cheap energy, domestic critical materials, sovereign compute, advanced manufacturing — because a powerful Europe is, by definition, a secure, resilient, and decarbonised one.

The team at World Fund spent the last few months developing the narrative for this report. Launching it in Copenhagen last week, in what felt inexplicably like summer sunshine in April, and watching LPs, VCs, and policymakers in the same room agree on the urgency — that was the moment I felt the argument land.

Now the harder part: turning alignment into capital.

The full report is available at worldfund.vc.