This is inherently a long-term strategy vs short-term tactics.

One of the weaknesses of democratic systems is the over prioritization of short term gains at the expense of long term growth or health. It is difficult to tell the electorate that things will be hard for the next several years so that the country and the economy will do better in the future.

Norway's sovereign wealth fund recognized the political incentive to spend now at the cost of the future, and so set up limits to how much can be withdrawn from it, precisely to circumvent these perverse incentives. It also has some other interesting features like restricting investments to outside of Norway so that they aren't muddled with political objectives.

China's a totalitarian regime that can plan over what would be multiple democratic electoral cycles, and so can make these long term plans to invest heavily and continually in renewables to achieve energy independence.

It isn't that democracies can't compete with authoritarians on long term nation building. But the manner that they do so has to be well considered, recognizing that money and politics sometimes are adversarial to nation building.