This week Women in Solar+ Europe gives voice to Janine Wirth, Founder and Managing Director of Germany’s Ilanco GmbH. As a woman in a male-dominated, engineering-driven industry, she has faced questions about how she could develop a technical solution without the “expected” background.
She argues that inclusion means judging ideas by their potential and results—not gender, credentials, or who is traditionally expected to solve the problem.
Renewable energy is an industry built around transformation, so I think we should be equally open to challenging established thinking within the industry itself. I came into solar without an engineering background, which meant I wasn’t conditioned to accept that things had to be done a certain way. I identified cable theft as a growing problem for solar developers across Europe, often involving sophisticated organized crime. When I looked more closely at the issue, I questioned why so much investment was focused on documenting theft rather than physically preventing it.
That question led me to develop Ilanco’s solution: a system designed to prevent solar cable theft rather than simply record or respond to it. Different backgrounds create different questions, and sometimes asking a different question is exactly where innovation begins. Coming from outside the industry let me approach an established problem without being constrained by how it had traditionally been addressed.
