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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.

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Land use and water management have considerable impacts on regional climates. This paper proposes that in humid regions with low wind patterns the construction of hydropower storage reservoirs contributes to the increases in the probability of precipitation in the regional climate. This observation has been tested with a methodology that calculates the cumulative influence of reservoir construction in the basins surrounding with a proposed index named Cumulative Impact of Existing Reservoirs, and compares this index with the historical flow of the rivers. It was found that the construction of reservoirs in Brazil had a considerable impact on its river flows.

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