This paper critically examines Brazil's transbasin diversion experiences and two select, large-scale transbasin projects outside of Brazil. Rather than simply compare Brazil's experiences with international cases, the authors explore the historical context of the projects, focusing on the water resources and environmental regulatory and institutional frameworks in place during the initial proposals and how they influenced the projects' development and completion rates. Huge investments, the lengthy time span between the date of the initial project proposals and the start of construction, the need to garner public and political support, and more recently, the need to fulfill national and regional environmental laws are major factors underlying heated public debates about the proposed projects. After a broad discussion about the subject, the authors examine a recently approved large-scale Brazilian project, the Sao Francisco river transbasin diversion. This river diversion project is considered crucial to the economic development of Brazil's semi-arid northeastern region. Despite the fact that this government-funded project was debated for several decades among the various stakeholders, it was approved under Brazil's newly formed water resources regulatory and environmental framework, which enabled improvements in various key technical aspects of the project, and greater involvement of various key social players.

With the increasing penetration of plug‐in electric vehicles (EVs), it has become important for utilities to identify how EV charging will affect their low‐voltage (LV) systems. In this context, EV hosting capacity can be useful to assist utility engineers. However, the appropriate strategy to estimate this index and determine its practical application for utilities is still unclear. In response, this study provides a framework to obtain and apply the hosting capacity information for EVs. Results of analyses are obtained considering the whole universe of a utility. Firstly, a method is developed for estimating this index based only on information readily available to utility engineers. The method is then used in a wide‐scale assessment of EV hosting capacity on 75,550 real LV systems. Quantitative results of this study provide insights into how to manage a system with high EV penetration. It is seen, e.g. that EV charging location is the most important variable to consider when stochastically assessing EV impacts, reducing difficulties to apply this type of solution for practical cases. Practical applications that employ EV hosting capacity statistics are also presented and discussed. Results are shown to be useful not only for utilities but also for regulatory agencies.

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With the publication of resolution #482/2012 by the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL), the penetration of small-scale photovoltaic (PV) generators has started to increase rapidly in Brazil. This trend will reduce the total energy consumed by customers from the utility. Therefore, traditional techniques used by distribution utilities for long-term energy planning (1 to 5-year horizon) must be updated to include PV generation impact. In response, this paper proposes a Monte Carlo based methodology for the long-term energy planning of distribution utilities, taking into account the probabilistic aspects of PV penetration growth. However, if simulations are conducted with high resolutions (e.g. 1-minute resolution) the time required to run all simulations may be excessive. To overcome this issue, an analysis of the data granularity impact on results precision is presented. It is observed that 1 "average day", described using 1-hour data resolution, is sufficient to provide a good and quick estimate of the PV generation impact on long-term energy planning.

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