You know, during this period, National Development Affairs Commissioner Liu Mingxing has been asking Sun Xuebin to capture more pirates or prisoners of war, etc., in order to enrich the sharply increasing mining labor force.
It is conceivable that with the completion of this power plant, the mining volume of local coal mines will also increase significantly in the future.
Sun Xuebin did the math. According to this calculation, if this power plant uses local coal in the future, it will only produce more than 3,000 tons per month, which is not too much.
But what he didn't expect was that Fang Xiaoyue then added: "The power generation of 5MW is still too low. It only generates 5,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per hour. The various machine tools and production lines in the military factory alone can generate thousands of electricity per hour." Are you using electricity? It is said that the steelmaking plant has expanded its production again..."
When Sun Xuba heard this, he had to start thinking about whether he should propose to the Senate to intervene in the war between the Nanming and Qing armies in advance. Otherwise, with the current situation of Nanhai Island, it would be impossible to provide more mining labor.
As mentioned before, the current population of Nanhai Island is only about 250,000, with nearly 4 million acres of cultivated land.
Of course, this is only the population statistics recorded in local government household registrations. Those who live in hiding and live in the mountains are not included in the statistics.
But even so, the total population of the entire South China Sea Island will not exceed 300,000.
According to the latest plan of the Ministry of National Development of Xinghai Kingdom, the plan is to build new farms all over the South China Sea Island. The first phase of the plan is to open up 10 million acres. Although it is planned to fully install agricultural machinery, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides to improve labor Efficiency, but this first-phase plan alone requires at least 100,000 people.
Each person manages a hundred acres of land, which is already the limit.
After all, with the existing industrial technology of Xinghai Kingdom, in terms of agricultural technology, it can only use steam boiler and camel type agricultural machinery for the time being. In terms of efficiency, it is definitely not as good as the fuel-fired agricultural machinery of later generations.
In short, the current population of Nanhai Island cannot support the development plan of Xinghai Kingdom.
The first phase of the farm costs 100,000, and the second phase will cost at least 100,000.
If industry develops, it will need at least the same population, and mining will require more, as well as military, administration, etc.
And among the 300,000 people in Nanhai Island, there are still quite a few minors, elderly people, etc. who are unable to work.
What's more, among the current 300,000 people on Nanhai Island, about 100,000 are women. According to current customs, most women are not allowed to go out to work.
Therefore, Sun Xuebin suddenly discovered that Xinghai Kingdom must start to introduce people. Otherwise, development will stagnate due to population reasons in up to two years.
The generator set was operating normally. After running for a full day, it was shut down for maintenance for three days, and then officially put into production.
After completing the power plant, Fang Xiaoyue handed over this matter to the newly established power group of the Ministry of Industry.
With the continuous increase of various machine tools, adding generator sets and so on will only be considered a trivial matter in the future.
As long as you have the design drawings, processing is not difficult.
Next, he focused on increasing the variety of trade goods for Xinghai Kingdom.
As mentioned before, due to the short time of traveling, there are not many commodities developed by the traveling people for trade, there are only glassware, soap, salt, etc. Even cement consumes too much and its production capacity cannot keep up. , it is not included in the trade list at all.
Under such circumstances, it was easy for Chen Liuxiang to lead the trade at first. After all, these commodities were considered to be in short supply and were highly sought after by the majority of merchants.
But as time goes by, some sequelae caused by too few product varieties have emerged.
After all, not every businessman is willing to trade these commodities. There are ways to sell these commodities, not to mention that except for salt, the main sales groups of the other two commodities are wealthy people.
Coupled with the invasion of the Qing army, many rich people have become low-key. Not to mention continuing to buy glassware and other luxury goods, even the glassware they have already purchased are carefully hidden, for fear that someone will accidentally be caught. The extremely greedy Qing army targeted them for extortion, not only ruining their fortunes, but also the lives of their entire family.
Rumors about the Jiading Three Massacres and so on have long been spread in Guangdong and other places.
Therefore, during this period, the performance of the Commercial Affairs Department can be said to have plummeted.
Although Xinghai State's finances can be temporarily supported by the precious metals produced by Fang Xiaoyue, Xinghai State's existing industrial system has too many raw materials that require external merchants to provide them.
If you only purchase the raw materials shipped by those merchants without enough goods for the other party to take away for secondary profit making, those merchants will gradually become less willing to come.
After all, in this era, why do maritime merchants risk storms, pirates, etc. to travel between places? It’s not just about making huge profits.
In a situation like Xinghai Kingdom, those businessmen would be halved in their huge profits, so naturally they would be unwilling to come.
Of course, due to limited time and energy, it is impossible for Fang Xiaoyue to take on all projects.
After a little thought, he chose food processing and water processing as his initial development projects.
As we all know, fighting at sea in this era is too hard and tiring. Not only is it hard to live in bed, but even eating and drinking is a very hard thing.
Due to the speed of sailing ships, traveling from one port to another can take as little as ten days or as many as several months.
After fresh vegetables, meat, water, etc. are put on the boat, they will be uneatable within a few days.
Meat will quickly rot and grow maggots, and water will quickly deteriorate and become fishy and undrinkable.
So these voyagers came up with various ways to preserve food and water.
For example, if you make the meat into extremely hard smoked meat and chop it with a knife, there will only be a shallow mark.
For example, make the beans into salt beans, bring cheese, bring as much beer as possible, or add beer to water to extend the shelf life of drinking water, etc.
But eating these every day will drive you crazy.
What's more, even smoked meat may sometimes be infested with maggots, and beer mixed with water can become rancid.
But on the sea, if you don’t eat these, what can you eat?
Therefore, every time the ship docks at the port, the sailors who have been empty and lonely on the sea for a long time will eat and drink, squander gold coins, and enjoy everything as much as possible.
Think about it, if cans were developed in advance, among other things, the maritime merchants would go crazy!
When Fang Xiaoyue held a project establishment meeting at the Ministry of Industry and prepared to ask Zhang Feifei to coordinate the mobilization of personnel, Zhang Feifei somewhat disagreed.
His reason was that if canned food could be developed in advance, European colonists might develop faster.
