The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) andthe Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas (CSDA) conductedtechnical studies and organized two training workshops to developcapacity in Central America for the evaluation of climate changeprojects. This paper describes the results of two baseline case studiesconducted for these workshops, one for the power sector and one for thecement industry, that were devised to illustrate certain approaches tobaseline setting. Multiproject baseline emission rates (BERs) for themain Guatemalan electricity grid were calculated from 2001 data. Inrecent years, the Guatemalan power sector has experienced rapid growth;thus, a sufficient number of new plants have been built to estimateviable BERs. We found that BERs for baseload plants offsetting additionalbaseload capacity ranged from 0.702 kgCO2/kWh (using a weighted averagestringency) to 0.507 kgCO2/kWh (using a 10th percentile stringency),while the baseline for plants offsetting load-followingcapacity is lowerat 0.567 kgCO2/kWh. For power displaced from existing load-followingplants, the rate is higher, 0.735 kgCO2/kWh, as a result of the age ofsome plants used for meeting peak loads and the infrequency of their use.The approved consolidated methodology for the Clean Development Mechanismyields a single rate of 0.753 kgCO2/kWh. Due to the relatively smallnumber of cement plants in the region and the regional nature of thecement market, all of Central America was chosen as the geographicboundary for setting cement industry BERs. Unfortunately, actualoperations and output data were unobtainable for most of the plants inthe region, and many data were estimated. Cement industry BERs rangedfrom 205 kgCO2 to 225 kgCO2 per metric ton of cement
