Designing the Systems Clean Technology Needs to Scale
Clean technology doesn’t fail because of ideas. It fails when capital, process, and execution can’t keep up. Green Power Plus is building the systems that help clean innovation move faster, scale smarter, and reach the market without waiting for permission.
Why Green Power Plus Is Treating the Energy Transition as a Capital, Process, and Execution Problem
Growing up inside beauty and delay produced an early awareness of stalled systems.
Esmeralda Colombo grew up in a small town in northern Italy, between Venice and the Dolomites, surrounded by cultural richness and limited institutional momentum. It was a place where talent existed, but opportunity arrived slowly, a contrast that left a lasting mark. “I was raised there in a place where there was no theater class,” she recalled, describing a childhood defined less by scarcity than by constraint.
That tension deepened during Italy’s sovereign debt crisis, when many young professionals were forced to leave. Colombo became part of a generation shaped by migration, living and working across Berlin, Brussels, New York, San Francisco, and Northern Europe. Each move revealed a different relationship between ambition and infrastructure. In the United States, especially, she encountered a culture that trusted the future and invested accordingly.
Law became her entry point into understanding why some systems moved and others stalled. Licensed in Italy and New York State and later a Fulbright scholar at Columbia, Colombo moved between academia and practice while remaining close to implementation. Her early startup experience in food waste reduction reinforced a lesson that would follow her into clean energy: innovation rarely fails because of ideas—it fails when systems cannot absorb them. She exited the venture in July 2021 with an ROI of 18,582.83%, having built Italy’s first food waste reduction SaaS
Exposure to U.S. innovation reframed clean technology as a capital and process challenge.
Working in renewables, hydrogen, and energy finance, Colombo saw a recurring pattern. Capital existed, but it moved slowly. Tenders stretched over years. Financial close became an obstacle course. Companies with viable technology struggled to survive long evaluation cycles. “It was not really a call from the environment but a call to improve the way innovation is really brought to the world,” she said, describing the frustration of watching good projects stall for procedural reasons.
Her perspective sharpened as her own time horizon expanded. Becoming a mother made questions of durability impossible to ignore. “Having children and getting the future in your arms” compelled a reckoning with the kinds of systems that today’s decisions leave behind. Short-term optimization, she concluded, creates long-term fragility.
Cleantech will dominate the future, with the Cleantech–National Security nexus alone expected to exceed $1.5T in value. Yet the sector faces significant execution challenges: 60% of projects experience cost overruns averaging 40.6%; only 27% stay on budget; and 45% of renewable energy projects are rejected by banks due to low bankability.
Compared with the oil and gas sector, the sector faces greater complexity and fewer standardized pathways to capital. GP+ exists to bring order and merit, and to enable innovators to succeed. It replaces fragmentation with integrated, vertical, agentic AI: a unified platform purpose-built for cleantech workflows, designed to plug directly into how projects are discovered, structured, financed, and delivered. GP+ acts as the AI-native operating layer that standardizes execution and capital flows across the cleantech value chain, starting with market access and procurement and expanding across bankability and clean data centers. Each function addresses a known bottleneck, but the intent is to achieve coherence rather than to provide point solutions.
Green Power Plus reflects a belief that integration determines whether innovation survives.
That belief underpins Green Power Plus, which Colombo co-founded to address what she sees as a structural mismatch between clean technology ambition and institutional readiness. The company focuses on AI-driven systems that accelerate tenders, engineer bankable financial models, surface qualified commercial opportunities, and design resilient data infrastructure. Each function addresses a known bottleneck, but the intent is to achieve coherence rather than to provide point solutions.
Colombo argues that ecosystems overloaded with single-problem startups often optimize for venture cycles rather than client reality. “If we just run startups based on the one problem we believe that VCs want to hear, then we run startups for VCs and not for clients,” she said, summarizing a critique shaped by years inside the sector. Her aim is to reduce the friction that causes good projects to fail before they reach scale.
That systems-oriented view has begun to resonate externally. In 2025, Green Power Plus was recognized at VivaTech, with support from McKinsey, for its scalable approach, an acknowledgment that solving multiple interconnected problems within a single platform reflects where the market is moving. For Colombo, the recognition mattered less as an award than as confirmation that integration is becoming a necessity rather than a preference.
Her work sits at the intersection of finance, technology, and operations, driven by a conviction that clean innovation must become easier to fund and easier to execute. The future she argues for is not one of louder ambition but of quieter alignment, in which systems are designed to allow progress to occur at the speed capital already knows how to achieve.
About Flashpoint POV Spotlights
Flashpoint Global produces each Founder POV Spotlight using its proprietary category leadership framework. Every Spotlight begins with a Future Narrative session, where a founder’s POV is clarified and operationalized as the lens through which new categories are built. The result is content that moves founders beyond product messaging and into the role of category leader, helping the market understand the problem, the stakes, and the future being created.
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