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 rapidly 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 how he should propose to the Senate to intervene in the war between the Nanming and Qing armies in advance. Otherwise, given 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, and there are 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 throughout the entire Nanhai 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 even more will be needed for mining, 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 at most in two years.
The generator set was running normally. After running for a whole day, it was shut down for maintenance for three days, and then it was 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 in the future will only be considered a trivial matter.
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 period, there are not many commodities developed for trade by the time travelers, only glassware, soap, salt, etc., and 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 businessmen.
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, and 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 focused on extortion, not only ruining the family's fortune, but also the lives of the 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 that Fang Xiaoyue metabolized, Xinghai State's existing industrial system has too many raw materials that need to be provided by outside merchants.
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 brave storms, piracy and other risks to travel between various places? It is not to make huge profits.
In a situation like Xinghai Kingdom, those businessmen would be halving their huge profits, so naturally they would be unwilling to come.
Of course, due to limited time and energy, Fang Xiaoyue cannot contract all projects.
After a little thought, he chose food processing and water processing as the initial development projects.
As we all know, working hard at sea in this era is too hard and tiring. Not only is it hard to live in bed, but also 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 ship, they will be uneatable within a few days.
The meat will quickly rot and spoil, and maggots will grow. The water will also quickly deteriorate, becoming 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.
Another example is to turn 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 can become rancid if mixed with water.
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 lonely and empty 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 the canned food was 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 be able to develop faster.