With the current worsening of climate change-associated risks, the transition to low-carbon energy sources has become a global priority. In this context, the advances in the implementation of smart grids, which, in addition to greater efficiency and resilience, also allow greater penetration of renewable distributed energy resources, are becoming increasingly important. However, the necessary investments will be colossal. Many specialists see the process of opening up the electric energy markets as essential to boosting these new technologies. Greater decentralization of the decision-making process can potentially promote greater scalability. However, not all liberalization reforms have led to good results. Several researchers have been evaluating experiences in different countries. Brazil, a country with continental dimensions and peculiar characteristics, already counts with a mostly renewable electric energy generation mix. In recent decades, however, it has become increasingly dependent on fossil fuel sources. Brazil has been conducting a process of opening the electric energy market since the 1990s. This process has faced a series of barriers. This article presents a critical bibliographic review of the Brazilian Power System history and its ongoing opening process, its possible successes and errors, as well as its perspectives and challenges.

Photovoltaic (PV) generation depends on the availability of solar resources, being directly influenced by the variation in irradiance due to the presence of clouds over the PV panels, causing a variation in the power output. The use of battery energy storage systems integrated with the PV showed to be a technically feasible solution to mitigate these power output fluctuations within the maximum ramp limit. Most articles reported in the literature on smoothing PV power output, by coupling with battery degradation as performance indicators of the control strategy, used the event-oriented model that considers only the number of cycles and depth of discharge. This paper presents on the comparative analysis of two approaches to battery degradation models, an event-oriented model based on the Rainflow counting and a semiempirical model, and applies to photovoltaic power smoothing by using a wide range of restrictions and installed PV plant capacities. The semi-empirical degradation model revealed higher battery degradation for all simulated cases. For Strategy 2, the order was 50% higher than the event-oriented model, probably due to severe DR and RR, which increases the stress on the battery. For Strategy 1, the difference was greater, between 100% and 300%. The event-based model indicated that Strategy 1 implied less battery degradation, but the semi-empirical model indicated the opposite. Considering that the semi-empirical model considers more parameters of degradation, the fact that Strategy 2 implies less degradation is more reliable. Moreover, the result obtained by the SimSES model corroborates that the accelerated lithium cell battery degradation takes place, as the operation is at high SoC. Maintaining Ebat, reference is SoC 80% decreased the degradation in at least 25% with respect to degradation, maintaining Ebat, reference is SoC 100%. For this, Ebat, reference of the SoC control, can be designed to avoid operating under a high load state. The results demonstrated that choosing a simplified degradation model approach can lead to an error in the conclusion of which strategies are the best since calendar life effects are very important in the application of PV power smoothing.