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.
The coating also lowers the panel temperature by 2-3 degrees Celsius compared to non-coated panels.
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 conventional fix — manually cleaning panels — comes with its own costs. A single 1MW plant can use 20,000 to 30,000 litres of water per cleaning cycle, often repeated weekly or fortnightly.
Dr. Harsha 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
In water-stressed states like Rajasthan, where water is sometimes trucked in by tanker, this isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s a direct hit to a farmer or operator’s bottom line, and to a community’s water security.
Most existing anti-soiling coatings in the market also degrade within months, requiring repeated reapplication.
How one coating helps panels clean, cool and capture more light
TriNANO’s answer is a 0.4-micron nano-coating — thinner than a human hair — applied directly to the glass surface of any solar panel, regardless of its brand, age, or manufacturer.
Sethi likes to describe the science using an unexpected metaphor: a rainforest canopy. “Our coating creates a similar micro-structure on the glass surface,” he explains.
Once applied, the coating helps the panel in four ways.
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Light-trapping: It guides more sunlight into the solar cells instead of letting it scatter away.
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Anti-reflection: It reduces the amount of light that bounces off the glass unused.
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Self-cleaning: It makes it harder for dust, oil, grime or bird droppings to stick to the surface. When rain falls, wind blows, or someone gives the panel a soft brush, the dirt comes off more easily.
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Cooling: It also helps keep the panel cooler by reflecting some of the heat-heavy infrared light. This matters because overheated panels generate less power and wear out faster over time.
The coating is different from a regular spray or paint. It forms a very thin, solid layer that bonds directly with the glass at the nanoscale.
This is why it can stay on panels with very different surfaces, whether they are brand-new or old, scratched panels that have spent years under the sun.
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.” That thought led to TriNano Technologies.
The best part is that it does not need a complicated factory setup to apply. It works at normal temperatures, without heating, baking or special equipment, whether the panel is on a production line or already installed in a field in Bikaner.
The technology has been independently validated at the National Centre for Photovoltaic Research and Education (NCPRE), IIT Bombay, through accelerated UV exposure, thermal cycling between 40°C and 185°C, damp heat testing at 85% humidity, and months of outdoor soiling trials against uncoated control panels.
“Third-party validation is everything in solar,” Sethi says. “Trust is built on data, not marketing.”
‘Every panel gains 4% more energy’
Across different panel brands, ages, and locations, TriNANO’s field data shows a consistent 4% increase in energy output — a number that sounds modest until you consider it at scale. The coating also cuts water consumption for panel cleaning by 55%, saving over a million litres of water per MW annually.
It helps panels last two to three years longer, reduces carbon emissions by 5.2%, and makes better use of land by 7.6%, because each panel produces more energy, so fewer panels and less space are needed.
One of the clearest independent confirmations of these numbers comes from Renkube, a Bengaluru-based solar operator that ran its own side-by-side trial.
Balaji Lakshmikanth, CEO and founder of Renkube, tested TriNANO’s coating against an uncoated panel over five months, from November 2024 to March 2025:
“We have tested the TriNANO coating on Renkube panels for a period of five months. Based on the field test results, we observed that the energy output of the coated panel was 6% higher compared to the non-coated, vertically aligned panel in the East-West direction. We appreciate the innovative solution.”
That kind of controlled, side-by-side comparison is rare in the solar coatings market, where claims are often made without a like-for-like baseline.
A major solar power producer’’s own retrofit at its Neemuch plant in Madhya Pradesh, tells a similar story: 11-year-old, Chinese-made ReneSola panels that had been cleaned twice a week saw a 3.8% increase in power generation and a 56% reduction in cleaning frequency after coating — numbers that closely mirror TriNANO’s broader field data.
For a small farmer running a 10kW rooftop system, a 2-3 year extension in panel life can defer replacement costs by Rs 1 to 2 lakh — money that can instead go toward irrigation, seeds, or school fees.
For a rural cooperative running a 100kW plant, that saving scales up to Rs 10 to 20 lakh.
There’s also a quieter, longer-term benefit: delaying India’s looming solar e-waste problem. “For a 100MW plant, that’s 2,30,000 to 2,50,000 panels delayed from disposal,” Sethi says. “It’s a small but meaningful step towards a circular solar economy.”
The deployment itself looks different depending on scale. At large solar farms, TriNANO plans to use automated robotic machines capable of coating hundreds of panels an hour.
At rooftop installations and smaller cooperatives, the application is manual or semi-automated.
“The large farms focus on ROI and MW-scale gains; small cooperatives care more about water savings and long-term durability,” Sethi says. “What’s common is the result — every panel, big or small, gains 4-6% more energy.”
What the pilots and paybacks look like
For a farmer, cooperative, or solar plant operator, the first question is simple: how much will this cost, and when will it start paying back?
TriNANO has kept its exact per-MW pilot pricing private. Its pilots have run across different sites but the company has not shared one fixed pilot cost publicly.
What is available is the per-panel price and the payback estimate. The coating is listed at around Rs 750 per 540Wp panel through CII’s marketplace listing.
Sethi has also told pv magazine that a 10MW plant with coated panels could generate an additional 720MWh of power in a year.
For a solar operator, that extra power means extra revenue. According to Sethi’s estimate, the investment can pay for itself in about two years.
So while TriNANO has not shared a public cost for each pilot, its pitch is built around a practical question for customers: if the panels can generate more power every day and need less water to stay clean, how soon does the coating recover its own cost?
The next challenge: coating more panels, faster
TriNANO has raised close to $700,000 (roughly Rs 6 crore) across two funding rounds — a grant round and a seed round — from investors including Spectrum Impact, Aar Em VenturesNRDC (a division of Ministry of Science and Technology), and Elektron Invest GMBH (Austrian German investor).
The startup’s nano-cladding technology acts as a robust shield, providing superior protection against factors like extreme temperatures, humidity, and UV radiation
Grants & awards have been from SISFS, Meity, IEEMA, LowCarbon.Earth, the CII Centre of Excellence for Innovation, Entrepreneurship and Startups, Greenr India, and SINE IIT Bombay itself.
That capital is now feeding a far bigger ask. According to YourStory’s reporting, TriNANO’s roadmap involves raising ₹5.5 crore to scale its annual coating throughput from 7MW to 330MW by FY 2026-27 — a 48x jump in capacity.
Trinano has already built/assembled one machine with capacity of 65 MW/year and are raising funds to build/assemble 5 more such machines to scale up.
The company’s own materials describe a two-year build-out: automated coating machines integrated into solar manufacturing lines in year one, followed by a scale-up to 330MW/year throughput and expanded global pilots in year two.
Each robotic coating line is reportedly capable of handling up to 65MW/year on its own, which is the throughput TriNANO is counting on to hit its broader target of 330MW of coating capacity by FY 2026-27, up from a standing start just four years ago.
Along the way, the startup has picked up recognition beyond MNRE backing — including a place on Forbes India’s Top 100 Startups list, the Maharathi Award at Startup Mahakumbh, and a Best Start-up award in the Deep Tech category at India’s National Startup Day, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi reviewed the technology in person.
What this coating could mean for India’s solar future
For all the data points, Sethi keeps returning to the human stories behind them: the Madhya Pradesh plant manager who could finally produce more with less, the Renkube founder who ran his own trial and came away convinced, the farmer who no longer has to choose between drinking water and a working solar panel.
“It works as an energy efficiency tool and a water security intervention,” Sethi says. “That’s why we say our coating makes both a climate and a social impact.”
As India pushes to expand its solar capacity through the next decade, innovations like TriNANO’s suggest that some of the biggest gains may come from helping the panels already standing work a little harder, with a little less.
