It's not "people doing something". To make power plants you need factories running. Produce steel, specialized metals, concrete, refine silica sand, produce electronics... You need mines for the base materials, and factories producing mining equipment. You need some rare earth metals, potentially. You need chemical plants too. And of course power and water input for the manufacturing sector.

All of which is nontrivial amount of investment nobody does where there is unemployment, because it's cheaper to do it in China as the base and subcomponents are already there... (there's also unemployment)

Trap of deindustrialization runs deep.