Abstract
Power systems are evolving very rapidly namely in what concerns the technologies used to generate electricity, the diversification of commercial relationships involving different agents and more specifically the empowerment of consumers. In this scope, several countries passed new legislation to induce the installation of Renewable Energy Communities, RECs, to induce new investments at a local level, to empower end consumers and to increase their self-sufficiency. However, the way Local Energy Markets, LEMs, will be integrated into Wholesale Markets, WSM, is not yet fully established. To this end, this paper proposes a design and an optimization model to increase the mentioned self-sufficiency level, to better manage the energy produced locally, also admitting the installation of battery storage units, and to profit as much as possible of them. LEM interaction with WSM, is based on an Agent Based Model architecture equipped with a Q-learning strategy. An economic assessment is also included, in order to get insights if some level of exemption, for instance associated with some components of the Access Tariffs, have to be considered in order to induce the massification of RECs.

Abstract
This paper describes the work developed to estimate the impact of the Special Regime Generation, SRG, in the generation cost in Portugal. Till the beginning of 2021 the values of the feed in tariffs paid to SRG were much larger than the market price paid to Normal Regime Generation, NRG, and this gap was often considered as a burden subsidized by consumers. In order to bring rational arguments to this discussion, several MSc Thesis were developed in recent years at the Engineering Faculty of Porto University to estimate the global generation cost in the country considering the current feed in regime and also admitting that generation paid feed in tariffs was reduced. This implied the calculation of the new market price if SRG was reduced and conversely NRG was increased. The results of the simulations developed for 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 indicate that the impact of SRG very much depends on the market price along the year. If the market price is reduced (for instance in good hydrological years as 2020) the elimination of SRG reduces the generation cost. Conversely, if the market price is high, the elimination of SRG tends to increase the generation cost.

Abstract
In every critical infrastructure system, unexpected events and outages have the potential to cause massive impacts, affecting people and the economy, such as in the power power grid blackouts. To avoid similar incidents in the future, extensive research is necessary to improve resilience and reliability of power grids. This work presents a Transmission Expansion Planning (TEP) model that confronts the largely adopted deterministic security criteria N-1 versus an AC-Cascade Failure Model (AC-CFM) analysis. The main goal is to highlight the importance of cascade failure analysis to increase power system resilience. Tests over the NREL-118 system verify the AC-CFM coupling in TEP models, demonstrating its benefits for assuming a risky proneness behavior for reaching long-term power grid resilience.