What is the significance of the Demonstration Center?
Oscar Goddijn: Our newly commissioned solar energy plant in Pune is the first of our demonstration facilities to showcase our technologies to customers and stakeholders around the world.

The demonstration center validates the performance of KhepriCoat, DSM's best-performing anti-reflective coating technology. The center will also test a new light trapping technology which DSM is developing, which gives solar panels a performance boost utilising smart 3D structures in a thin plastic foil.

Advanced Surfaces obviously requires a lot of research. How are you involving India in it?
Oscar Goddijn: The Advanced Surfaces division is still an emerging segment for DSM so most of the research work is happening in Europe. Although we have started doing some additional activities in Shanghai with regards to environmental material development centers.

It's fair to say that we would like to expand that and to also ensure that we start to involve local institutes and development capabilities here in India.

Last year, we have started some discussions with the renewable energy division at FICCI - more specifically the solar energy part. I stated during my discussions there that I genuinely believe that India should also focus on developing new technologies itself. DSM Advanced Surfaces would be very willing to help and to even bring technology in and develop it further for local use and also, for instance, to generate panels that could be used in Japan because there is a close relationship between India and Japan especially in the solar area.

So I think there are big opportunities there but until now I did not see a lot of developments in India itself with regards to technology. It's mainly about implementing solar parks and not so much about developing new technologies. And I believe that we need to take that step.

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