CO levels showed the most significant reductions during the partial lockdown.• NO 2 decreased in a lower extent, due to industrial and diesel input. • PM 10 levels were only reduced during the first partial lockout week. • Ozone increased due to the decrease in nitrogen oxides level in a VOCcontrolled scenario.

Primary atmospheric pollutant concentrations decreased during the lockdown. • Ozone levels increased during lockdown in many cities of the world. • Ozone levels were related to the increase in NMHC/NO x ratios in a VOCcontrolled scenario. • Air masses from the industrial areas contributed to ozone increase.

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The evolution of existing electricity grids to smart grids strongly relying on information and communication technologies will expectedly contribute to improving the system overall efficiency. However, the economic characteristics of the electricity sector tend to discourage investments in smart grids. In this context, it is understandable many countries have adopted incentive policies to foster the deployment of smart grids. It is noticeable that these policies vary depending on the specific characteristics of each country. Therefore, the design of specific public policies for Brazil must consider not only the motivations involved, but also the existing challenges for the implementation of smart grids and the socioeconomic context. Moreover, the relevance of the proposed policies can be seen from different perspectives, which justifies the importance of eliciting information from multiple stakeholders for decision support purposes. This paper presents and assesses a set of policies identified by different stakeholders as having a potential major contribution for the development of smart grids in Brazil. The methodology to shape this set of policies consisted of a thorough literature review of international experiences combined with meetings with experts in several domains in order to identify the current situation and development prospects of smart grids in Brazil. An assessment of these policies was made by applying a Delphi questionnaire with the purpose of measuring their effectiveness in fulfilling the objectives associated with investments in smart grids. A first conclusion is that all policies were assessed as being positive taking into account each of the objectives. This means that the experts classified all policies as relevant to be adopted, differing only in the priority to be assigned to each one. The policies that were considered more relevant were: "Incentive Policies for Promoting Demand-Side Management, Distributed Generation and Storage", "Regulatory Changes to Foster Innovation in the Energy Sector" and "Regulation of New Business Models". Among the policies with the worst scores, "Mandatory Rollout of Smart Meters" and "Establishing Quality Standards for the Telecommunications Industry" were ranked as the two lower-ranked policies, i.e., they were assigned lower priority under all objectives.

This work presents a methodology to perform a multi-criteria decision analysis based on qualitative assessments from multiple experts or stakeholders. The application that motivated these methodological developments is also described, consisting of an assessment of policies to foster technological innovations in the electricity sector, namely in a context of evolution to smart grids. Qualitative assessments were elicited from 28 experts using a Delphi process. The assessments concern the impact of policies on different objectives, but also opinions concerning the importance of these objectives. These opinions are translated into constraints on the weights of the corresponding criteria, in a partial information setting. Then, policies are sorted into categories based on a stochastic multi-criteria analysis for the ELECTRE TRI method. A new ranking approach is also developed to be compatible with the sorting results, based on a robustness analysis of ELECTRE TRI credibility indices. Results are discussed considering the entire set of experts and considering subsets of experts representing different perspectives.

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