In a solar plant in central Madhya Pradesh, an 11-year-old installation was dying a slow death.

The panels, battered by over a decade of dust and heat, had been manufactured by a Chinese supplier that had since folded — leaving no warranty, no support, and a plant manager watching his output drop month after month while his cleaning and labour bills climbed.

A few months after his panels were coated with a nanotechnology solution developed by a Mumbai-based startup, he called the company's founder directly.

"Dr Sethi, we're producing more power with less water," he said. "We didn't think that was possible."

Dr Harsh Sethi remembers the relief in his voice. "It wasn't just about the numbers for him," he says. "It was about keeping the plant viable, keeping jobs secure, and making sure they could continue to serve their customers."

That moment, Sethi says, is exactly why he built TriNANO Technologies.

From failure to solar nanotechnology

Sethi's path to solar wasn't a straight line. A materials engineer by training, he spent over two decades working across energy, engineering, and global operations — refining oxygen-free copper, working with ESR tool steels, and eventually co-founding Neon Infotech in 2000, a technology solutions company that grew operations across India, Thailand, South Korea, Myanmar, the UAE, and the US.

Before that success, there were five failed startups. "I'm a first-generation, serial entrepreneur," Sethi says simply.

The pivot to solar came almost by accident. In 2016-17, when oil prices spiked, one of his clients invested in a solar plant.

During a casual conversation, the plant manager said something that stayed with Sethi: "We lose more energy to dirt than to clouds."

India was building solar capacity at record pace — but losing a significant share of it to something as mundane as dust.

Around the same time, Sethi witnessed a farmer using precious drinking water to wash his solar panels because he simply couldn't afford the output loss from leaving them dirty.

"I knew we could do better," Sethi says.

By 2018-19, he had begun building what would eventually become TriNANO's core technology: a single nano-coating.

TriNANO Technologies Pvt Ltd was formally registered in January 2022, in Maharashtra, and was incubated at the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) at IIT Bombay. 

The journey wasn't smooth — COVID hit the young company hard between 2020 and 2022 — but support from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE) and IIT Bombay helped it survive.

Today, TriNANO is a National Deep Tech award-winning startup, working with both rural cooperatives and some of India's largest solar players.

The dust problem draining India’s solar output 

The numbers behind the problem are stark. Solar panels rated for 20-22% efficiency under standard lab conditions typically deliver only 15-18% efficiency once installed in the real world — a gap caused largely by dust accumulation, light reflection, and heat. Large solar plants can lose anywhere between 15% and 30% of their potential output this way.

The........

© The Better India