Canada to Build 40MW Solar Power Plant 402
IceDiver writes "According to an article in the Toronto Star, an Ontario company has been given approval to build a 40MW solar power plant near Sarnia in Southwestern Ontario. This is enough power for about 10,000 homes. The plant will cover 365 hectares (1.4 sq. miles) and is to be operational by 2010. OptiSolar, the company building the plant, claims to have developed a way to mass produce the solar panels at a dramatically reduced cost, making the plant competitive with other forms of power generation. 'Compared to coal, nuclear power, even wind, solar's squeaky-clean image comes at a high price. OptiSolar is selling the electricity to the province under its new standard offer program, which pays a premium for electricity that comes from small-scale renewable projects. In the case of wind, it's 11 cents per kilowatt-hour. Solar fetches 42 cents per kilowatt hour, nearly four times as much.'"
and coal? (Score:4, Informative)
or evertything else... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Informative)
No misunderstand the program. It isn't end-consumers who pay the $0.42/KWh, its the Province of Ontario, through the Ontario Power Authority. It simple gets pumped into the grid, and the consumers continue to pay the standard rate. The contract with the Province is good for 20 years.
The idea is to spur development of renewable energy sources, while fossil fuel based plants are taken offline. It's a pretty sweet deal for the microgenerators (the program is only open to projects that generate a maximum of 10MW at a voltage of 50kV or less).
Note that during peak periods, an extra 3.52/KWh is paid out, and the contract is indexed to inflation. And anyone in Ontario can apply to have their renewable resource microgenerator included in the program simply by filling out an online form.
IMO, this is an excellent program. Ontario has been rebuilding nuclear capacity, has a lot of hydroelectric generation, and has been taking fossil fuel based plants offline (slowly). My family has some holiday property in central Ontario that goes unused for much of the year, and I've long thought that we should invest in some solar panels and a small wind turbine hooked into the power grid to generate some revenue. A program like this could very well make it worth it in the long run. Every such project, no matter how small, is that much less reliance needed on a fossil fuel-based plant somewhere.
Yaz.
Re:or everything else... (Score:5, Informative)
Oops -- I forgot the URL to the programs website, for the interested:
http://www.powerauthority.on.ca/sop/ [powerauthority.on.ca]
Yaz.
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Glad to hear that the Province of Ontario no longer has ANY taxation of its citizens! Wonderful news - I'll move there immediately!
Oh wait, they still have to tax the population to pay for things like health, education, ro
Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Informative)
A few points:
FWIW, I haven't lived in Ontario for a few years. I have family that still does, however. IMO, this seems like a pretty good investment on the part of the Province and on the part of taxpayers -- taxpayers get clean burning energy, pollution-related health care costs decrease, jobs are created, and with a bit of luck and ingenuity green power related industries move to Ontario due to its expended market. Sounds like a pretty good deal to the citizens of Ontario to me.
Investments cost money. Governments have been investing in fossil fuel based power plants for decades, through either direct ownership or subsidies. Hell, chances are very good that the power in whatever region you're living in is or has been subsidized by tax dollars. Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Yaz.
Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Interesting)
In other words, even a hundred of these plants, with a combined cost of $30 billion dollars, wouldn't be able to replace Nanticoke. Meanwhile 4 Gigawatt nuclear reactors would cost ~4-8 Billion dollars and eliminate the need for nanticoke, complete with around a 30% increase in available power.
Projects like this one will create jobs, which is a net increase for the Province when it comes to overall tax collections.
Projects like this make sense if they increase economic activity, but building any kind of new power plant would do the same, and cheap power would help attract more new business than expensive power. Being miserly is the best way to increase business in many ways - providing the most services for the dollar.
I agree with you on the idea of eliminating pollution, just on the how.
Why start bitching about it just because in this case it's a green technology subsidy
Because it costs around 8 times as much as other clean technology? And people complain about Haliburton*.
*Not because I like fraud, but I also dislike waste. Rather than using this to 'spur' development, they'd be better off investing half directly into solar development and the other half building a few new nuclear reactors.
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For the record, I am not against nuclear power. Ontario has nuclear power facilities, and are apparently setting up to bring 4 new reactors online by 2018 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darlington_Nuclear_G enerating_Station [wikipedia.org]).
Ontario is a big place, however, with 1.5 times the surface area of the state of Texas. This is a very large area to s
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$20 million for a 10MW reactor [doe.gov] good for 30 years. Prototype development and regulatory fees estimated at costing $600 million for the first unit, after that the marginal cost would be $20 million.
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Re:or evertything else... (Score:5, Insightful)
A better way to encourage renewable energy sources would be a tax on electricity based on its environmental damage. If would make renewable energy more viable and force people into using less electricity. But this wouldn't involve as many opportunities for back-handers.
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Yeah, but if the cost is passed on to others by means of electricity prices (the less you use, the less you pay) instead of Yet Another Services Tax (doesn't matter how much you use, everybody pays), *AND* you're the one on the receiving end by virtue of being paid by the province because you sell your excess generated electricity,
1) you
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I'm not a "greenie". I can, however, use proper capitalization, grammar, and spelling.
You have to realize that
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I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
*Basically what percentage of the plant's rated capacity it actually averages. A 40MW plant with a power factor of 40% would actually average 16MW. A 1
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I'd tend to think that the taxpayers would rather pay to replace the plants with cheaper and more effective alternatives. For example, while this has a construction cost of $8 watt, with a power factor* likely between 30-40%
continuation:
nuclear power has contstruction costs of between $2-4/watt, and a factor around 90%, making it around twice as efficient per watt as solar. Fuel costs are actually considered trivial, and containing nuclear waste, while expensive, there actually i
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These comparisons of various power generation techniques -- coal, gas, nuclear, solar, wind -- do a good job of comparing current operating cost and construction costs but generally seem to ignore the lifetime costs.
Is coal still a good economic decision if you figure in the cost to restore the open pit mine, remove the carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxides from the air, and remove the silt and pollution from the local streams and r
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That said, the fact that research was 100% halted in the early 1990s by the Clinton administration on one of the most promising of these breeder types (the IFR) due to proliferation concerns (showing a fundamental lack of understanding of th
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Not quite true. Power is a Provincial jurisdiction, so it varies from Province to Province. Ontario has a system like this, but the Standard Offer Program for Small Electricity Generators bypasses this system, as it appears that they buy the power from the mic
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This is good news. This is a sane source of electricity that will help solar power gain the momentum for an economy of scale.
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I don't mind nuclear myself, but I can't build a reactor in my back yard (well maybe, but I don't think my neighbors would like it)
With solar, I can put it in my back yard effectively offsetting my own power needs without paying anyone else in the process. Currently, it isn't cost effective to do so with the price of solar cells, but if the
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Shame (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Shame (Score:5, Insightful)
Cheap, efficient, easily maintianable solar is not hard at all. All you need is mirrors, some slow electric motors, a working fluid, and a conventional turbine. Oh, and a lot of land not near NIMBYs, who for some reason will find a reason to be scared of everything.
Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:4, Informative)
Building a solar-panel power station is "cool", "neat", and "oh, so hip". However, it makes no economic sense. Solar power is about 3x the cost of the most expensive nuclear power.
Nuclear power is the way to go.
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Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear power is the way to go.
Ok, its not quite as simple as that.
Nuclear power by standard technology requires enrichment. Thats because they require a much higher percentage of U235 [wikipedia.org] in order to sustain a reaction than occurs naturally.
U235 is only 0.7% of uranium (as it has a half life about one tenth of U238 [wikipedia.org]). You need 4% or more to do a conventional nuclear reactor.
Enrichment also means throwing away a lot of U238, which will never be used in a conventional reactor.
Now we can use U238 in a breeder reactor [wikipedia.org] (and Thorium, which converts to U233). But if you do that, its a whole different technology, and the costs [wikipedia.org] aren't as clear cut.
If you were to try and run the world on conventional reactors, the supply of uranium would last us 20 years or so. If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several hundred years.
So the only price that is relevant is the breeder reactor price of electricity. Because there isn't enough U235 in the world to really get serious about using it this way.
Breeder reactor technology is real, we can do it. Its a bit more expensive, but will no doubt get cheaper with use. Guess what? So will solar power.
And, at the risk of being doom and gloom, guess which one will still be plentiful in the year 3000? There is a finite amount of fissile material on the planet. The sun should be good for about 500 million years or so, as opposed to 500 years.
I know that there are energy storage issues for baseload, but there are solutions such as solar towers [wikipedia.org]. And open battery [wikipedia.org] storage.
I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but in the longer run, its also a stop gap for solar energy (including wind & hydro as being solar in origin), geothermal and tidal energy. So that is where we need to spend the big dollars.
My 2c worth.
Michael
Re:Biggest Shame: Emotion Trumps Science (Score:4, Interesting)
As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission. Then I'd consider it efficient use.
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As our understanding of the physical world increases, it should be possible to extract electrons directly from the items undergoing fission.
I am astonished by the number of physical misunderstandings you must have that would cause you to write such a sentence.Re: (Score:3, Informative)
> If you can use breeders, you will get maybe a 100 years (depends how much we use). If you add in thorium, several
> hundred years.
Twenty years--lets look at that the number carefully. The current mineral inventory of uranium, coupled with current enrichment technology and usage gives you about 70 years [world-nuclear.org]. If one projects that number of reactors triples, then we can get the twent
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Ratio's (Score:5, Insightful)
It appears the footprint per house of the solar panels is actually less than the footprint of a house by itself. Surely it should be mandatory/make sense for compulsary solar panelling on houses?
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Re:Ratio's (Score:5, Informative)
365 hecters = 39.3 million square feet. The average [census.gov] size of new homes are ~2.4k square feet each, or 24 million square feet total. This doesn't count roof space though, as a two story house will have half the roof expected.
It's close, but not a match.
Hmm... 40MW over 10k homes only leaves 4kw average draw per house, or 16 amps of 240 during the day. Figure a 50% load factor(High end), that's 1,440 kw/h per house. At my local price of $.08/kwh $115.20 of electricity. I saw that Canada's subsidizing solar to the tune of $.24/kwh, so it'd end up being $345.60 of electricity.
This is considered good how?
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Excuse, me, I'm dyslexic apparently. $.42/kwh = $604.80
Are they insane?
$70-80 million for a 10mw install, this one is expected to run $300 millon.
$80 million for 10mw = $8 a watt, in Canada I'd expect availability to limit the production factor to, at most, 40%
Let's beat the nuclear drum a bit.
Nuclear power = $1-2/watt, for a production factor that's above 80% today.
For around four times what they're
In pursuit of the almighty buck, coal would win (Score:2)
If I was solely in pursuit of the 'almighty buck' I'd have suggested coal. Coal, with minimal pollution controls would probably run $.25/watt capacity. Fuel costs would be higher, of course. With newest generation pollution control technology costs increase to the point that a minor rise in coal costs would make nuclear cheaper even in the short run.
I'd say that the difference between nuclear and solar isn't enough to justi
Only for a very few homes, though. (Score:3, Interesting)
The nuclear plant could give far, far many more homes carbon-neutral power -- the wind plant is going to give it to just a few, while the rest are still going to be stuck on highly polluting fossil fuel generation. When you factor all that fossil fuel into the "solar" column, which you need to, in order to produce the same amount of power from a finite investment in plants, it's not very clean at all.
It's n
Re:Only for a very few homes, though. (Score:4, Informative)
A 40MW plant of solar is unlikely to enable the takedown of even a single coal plant. Even ten of them is unlikely to. Ten of these solar plants would cost $3Billion dollars, which, depending upon which figures you use, would result in 1-3GW of new nuclear plant capacity, which would enable the shutting down of a number of coal plants.
Is it just me, or does it appear that somebody's being awfully free with the troll mod on anybody being down on solar power, or this install of it?
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Of course, I live in North Dakota, one of the cheapest states to live in. There's a large coal plant about 2 hours south of me.
Re:Ratio's (Score:5, Insightful)
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The canadian plant is dedicating 4KW per home. In US terms, this is over a $100 of electricity. More than most people would use except for those with electric heat.
The UK one would be 2.7kw per home, so yeah, they're figuring on less power usage. Maybe the UK has fewer electric ranges/stoves/water heaters on average. Lights probably won't make much difference.
Now, in either case there's also the question of whether the reporter figured the power factor in, and
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Was it snowing in Cornwall 2 weeks ago? (Score:3, Insightful)
Net metering (Score:2)
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No more so than the oil pumps you see scattered throughout Alberta. And the landowners have no choice, because somebody else owns the mineral rights. Perhaps the government should expropriate solar rights (eminent domain) and grant them to the energy companies.
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I'm not impressed (Score:2, Insightful)
I especially don't want to pay those rates for a dead-end technology. It's one thing to build a pilot plant at subsidized rates if it can realistically
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It is nice if there is a single missing cause, and if we find and solve it we have cost-effective solar power. It is very rare for technology to work that way. Take chips. The transistor on a chip was a breakthrough, sure, but it took an awful long time to get me a 3 GHz Mac. All the time I
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40MW is not that much (Score:5, Informative)
Hydropower is hideously 'dirty.' (Score:2)
By converting a free-flowing river or stream into a pool of water, you cause the level of dissolved oxygen in it to go down; this alters the balan
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How much energy was/is spent building it, maintaining it, mining for its fule,transporting the fule and manage its waste ? You need to offset that before you can draw any conclusions about its efficency.
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Is it possible to use only renewable sources? (Score:2, Insightful)
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So it won't give us 100% coverage? well, even if all roofs covered in solar panals only covered 10% of our needs, it's still better than those 10% being covered by coal plants.
Yes, we do have to make more energy-efficient appliances and sadly yes, we do face big problems in the future.
The problems we face might be solvable by nuclear power, but we also know that this has long term problems we don't want,
I think it's best to at least get as much as
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By my calcs, it seesm that the solar project would cover about half a house's needs by converting it's roof to photovoltiac.
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The issue of liquid fuels is a little di
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Photovoltaic vs. SEGS (Score:4, Interesting)
SEGS [solel.com]
Re:Photovoltaic vs. SEGS (Score:4, Interesting)
Mirrors+water+sun=very cheap and effective. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes a major generation method. For a large scale app you would want a turbine, but on a small scale you could probably do some interesting things with just the steam itself.
After all, the first solar app I saw as a kid was just to heat water for the home. Pipes+black paint+water pump=fewer oil deliveries. Why don't more people do this?
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Bangalore, Areas in the USA south of the Mason-Dixon line? They should be everywhere.
For the power station though, it doesn't matter as much as they're focusing lots and lots of sunlight into a small area with constant circulation - not much is going to be radiated, and the situation demands more durability and raw absorbtion ability than reduced radiation.
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Translation (Score:3, Funny)
For you metric-challenged Americans, that equates to about 25.74 Libraries of Congresses.
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Using Homestead Speedway as a baseline at 600 acres,
that there solar plant will take 1.5 Nascars of space.
simcity (Score:4, Funny)
Re:simcity (Score:5, Informative)
free sunshine no so free. (Score:2)
OptiSolar (Score:2)
This is interesting, as Opti is currently finishing their Long Lake facility [opticanada.com] which uses new technology for heavy oil upgrading and energy-saving in addition to the SAGD [wikipedia.org] extraction method. Part of the $5 billion project is a huge oxygen plant which will help cleanly bu
Well (Score:5, Insightful)
But think about it for a moment : in the long run (as in next 10-20 years), what form of energy is subject to the biggest reduction in costs?
Solar : You make the panels. As soon as the technology stabilizes and we finally agree on a dirt cheap, efficient form of panel (there's about 20 different methods talked about) you build a plant that makes acres of it all day long. Every piece exactly like all the others. Fully automated. You truck them to a spot in barren wasteland, and dump them. Plug them in. A simple robot washes the grit off every now and then.
I don't think it is unreasonable to expect a factor of TEN reduction in cost. After all, the raw materials are low grade silicon wafers and energy (which can be supplied by panels produced by the plant itself...)
As for land : I calculated that at 10% net efficiency, we would need a 200x200 mile area of Arizona to power the entire United States. That includes all the energy used for transportation, and losses used in spinning up energy accumulator devices. That land currently sits idle, and while is a lot of area, there's still plenty of Arizona left (I used google earth to check this)
Nuclear : while solar requires only a handful of educated people, and can't be screwed up catostrophically, nuclear will ALWAYS require a lot of skilled labor to handle and high liability. Even the most dummy proof pebble ped reactor design would still need all sorts of care to handle the fuel and maintainence on the plant. You can't cut corners on nuclear. You can't mass produce
the plants as easily.
Everything that comes into proximity of the reactor becomes nuclear waste. It all has to be carefully handled. There's hazardous environments, especially for a plant that does reprocessing, where hot spent fuel has to be handled and worked with.
I like nuclear power : it's complex and cool and involves all sorts of neat things. Fusion is even cooler. But realistically, for the forseeable future solar is a MUCH better prospect. I believe had a few billion been sunk into a robotic factory to manufacture solar panels, we would not even be having this debate.
(when I say forseeable...I mean it. There's actually a VASTLY more efficient way to do interplanetary, and even interstellar, travel that doesn't involve fusion or fission plants...)
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I read that nuclear engineers at a university in Oregon are developing a reactor that is a sealed box that can be transported on a flatbed rail car. You transport it from the factory to where you want power, and install it in a pool of water. It lasts for five years, at which time you send it back to the factory for maintenance and refueling, and you replace it with a new one.
The reactor can generate enough power for 35000 homes, which I guess is 140MW. It costs 3.5 cents per kilowatt-hour, including fue
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2) What does the plant look like that has to maintain these things for refueling? (hint : think lots of dangerous areas)
3) Uh, you didn't include the nuclear waste disposal fee. To do this according to federal standards may cost several cents for
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1) Can you trust ANYONE with the keys to the reactor, or is it always a danger? (hint : it is still a nuclear reactor. It has EXTREMELY dangerous high level radiation inside it, and if someone were to deliberately blow it up it could make a lot of people sick)
It's sealed in multiple layers. The outside might be railcar sized, but the actual material is about the size of a log. There's literally no user servicable parts. The description was that the plant gets two pipes
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1) It has no keys; it's a sealed box. As I understand it, on-site maintenance involves keeping the pool filled, and taking care of the electrical connection to the grid. The box is shielded so that no radiation can escape, and given the small size it can't have that much nuclear material in it. Yeah, blowing it up would be bad, so it needs physical security, but that's true of any power plant, chemical plant, most manufacturing plants, etc.
2) I'll bet the plant is a lot cleaner and safer than coalmine, oi
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Are you talking about this [steorn.com]?
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The idea is simple. You leave your propulsion system anchored to the start point. The spacecraft is just a receiver.
For rocket launches into orbit, you build an array of pulsed LED diode lasers. They vaporize an inert block of mat
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I think you need a remedial course in geometry. The parent says
Guilt (Score:2)
real cost (Score:2, Interesting)
Fischer-Tro [wikipedia.org]
That seemed weird to me (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose centralizing it makes maintenance easier, though. Things like this seem like they would make more sense in the southwestern US. I'm sure we could spare a few square miles of desert, and the power production would
Ok..... (Score:2)
Hectares? (Score:3, Funny)
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There, fixed it for you. iPods, laptops, flashlights, cellphones all use very little power when you start looking that things like heating homes, 80 gallon water heaters, 100 watt lights, etc... The charger for my cellphone outputs a mere 6.6 watts, and can charge the phone in well under an hour, which has an advertised standby time of days and talk time in hours. Meanwhile my water heater takes up 5.5 kilowatts, near
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Re:While it is a good idea (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at this map:
http://www.solar4power.com/map2-global-solar-power .html [solar4power.com]
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Seriously, though, this is the modern, capitalist equivalent of paying for research. They pay a special premium in hopes that someone will take the bait and build the product. If they do, then there is a chance that the process will become more efficient, and the eventual cost will come down.
For those who have posted that the electricity rates are