In September, India’s Ministry of New and Renewable Energy added more than 12 GW of solar module capacity to its, taking the total past 228 GW. Government-backed projects may only use modules from the list, and getting onto it takes a Bureau of Indian Standards certificate, so the ALMM works as the country’s quality filter. What a listing cannot show is how a production line performs from one shift to the next, or whether the wattage printed on a panel is what it delivers.
Lokesh Ramesh, a materials and manufacturing engineer trained at Anna University in Chennai, knows both from the inside: the line that builds modules and the instrument that rates them. At Hanwha Qcells’ factory in the US state of Georgia, at more than 5.1 GW, he led a module line of more than 100 technicians, operators and supervisors as its production engineer. Under him, the line cut soldering defects by 98% within four months and took final quality yield past the plant’s 99% target for the first time. He then turned to the rating itself: his US provisional patent application covers a way to make it tamper-evident from the moment it is measured.
When he took charge in February 2024, building the line’s improvement programme from scratch fell to him. “Each of the four shifts ran the line its own way, and performance was uneven because of it,” recalls Lokesh Ramesh. “So we benchmarked all four on the same metrics and built one line standard out of the best practices each shift already had.” Every shift got its own targets, and whenever output and quality pulled in different directions, the final say was his — in critical cases, quality won.
Electroluminescence imaging, which makes hidden cracks and gaps in solar cells visible, lets him trace defects back to individual operators on every shift. Where strings of soldered cells were repaired, he logged cell waste and repair results per operator, not per station, and the numbers pointed to handling technique rather than the machine. Targeted retraining against those numbers halved operator-caused gap defects and cut defects on repaired modules by 58%. By spring 2025, output against target was up 19%, and the line had outproduced its identical twin — the closest thing a factory has to a control group — over $30 million worth of modules.
Even a well-run line depends on one measurement at its end: the flash test, a burst of simulated sunlight that determines the wattage printed on every module. Manufacturers, buyers, installers and financiers rely on that figure, and in India, where modules sell by the watt, it sets the price. Because tester settings can be changed before results are stored, modules anywhere may ship with the wrong rating. “Conventional systems protect data only after it reaches a database,” Lokesh Ramesh says. “Until then, the instrument itself stays exposed.”
His answer, developed through Lowkey Solutions, the company he founded, is to seal the test setup and results cryptographically at the instrument. The sealed record goes into a shared ledger, and its fingerprint is anchored to a public blockchain, so any later edit shows. A built-in detector flags four patterns of tampering; in tests he ran on a working prototype covering the whole chain, from instrument to ledger, the detector caught every one.
The same attention to where a number comes from runs through his work as a manufacturing engineer at Tigre USA, part of Brazil’s Grupo Tigre, a pipe fittings maker present in some 30 countries. Productivity norms for more than 6,000 of its products rest on his time-and-motion studies, and over 15 written standards built on his methods guide more than 10 people on a daily basis.
The habit of chasing a defect to its root cause, Lokesh Ramesh says, comes from his materials science training. A mechanical engineering degree in Chennai was followed by a master’s in materials science at the University of California, Riverside, where he co-authored, with Professor Alexander Balandin, a in the IEEE Open Journal of Nanotechnology. Journals call on that expertise: the, a leading Elsevier title published since 1960, has twice invited him to review manuscripts, and the Journal of Research on Engineering Structures and Materials has named him to its advisory board.
Both US provisional patent applications are to become full ones: one for the data-sealing method and one for a lightweight aluminium-Kevlar laminate designed for protective structures. In his simulations, the laminate absorbs 1.4 to 2.3 times as much impact energy per kilogram as aluminium, and the study is under journal review. “I publish research so other engineers and researchers can build on it,” he says.
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