In the first year of the “15th Five-Year Plan”, a number of national energy special plans were released one after another. How can hydrogen energy, new energy storage, and computing synergy be implemented and developed? Reporters go deep into the front lines of the industry to interpret how planning and deployment are transformed into industrial reality.
Hydrogen energy storage and transportation bottlenecks are accelerated
During the "15th Five-Year Plan" period, hydrogen energy was included in the non-fossil energy supply system for the first time and officially became an important part of my country's clean energy. Follow the reporter's lens to learn about it.
Hydrogen and oxygen "shake hands" in the car, and after a reaction, electricity comes out and becomes the power of the car, leaving only water. And this is the biggest difference between hydrogen and coal and oil. Cleanliness is the most fundamental characteristic of hydrogen. Not only is it clean, hydrogen can also make cars run further. This heavy-duty truck being hydrogenated can be filled with 37 kilograms of hydrogen at a time and can run more than 500 kilometers.
Although hydrogen is clean and has high energy, it is extremely light and can slip through a small gap. It is more laborious to store and transport it than oil or electricity. Storage and transportation were once a stumbling block that hindered the development of the hydrogen energy industry, but now this stumbling block is being removed.
CCTV reporter Sun Yuan: This is the most mainstream hydrogen storage tank currently on the market - a 35 MPa hydrogen storage tank. The pressure inside the tank is 350 times the atmospheric pressure, which is equivalent to the water pressure on the seabed at a depth of 3,500 meters. Why are you pressing so hard? Because hydrogen is too "light", it cannot be transported without pressure.
Such a hydrogen storage tank can hold 11 kilograms of hydrogen, and in order to hold more hydrogen, in this company, liquid hydrogen storage tanks are being developed.
Not only the facilities for storing and transporting hydrogen energy are becoming more and more complete. At present, my country's first inter-provincial, large-scale, long-distance pure hydrogen transmission pipeline - the West-East Hydrogen Transmission Channel is stepping up construction. At present, the total mileage of hydrogen pipelines that have been built or planned and under construction across the country has exceeded 13,000 kilometers. The bottlenecks of hydrogen that were once "unstorable and unmovable" are being broken.
Hydrogen energy is included in the five-year plan for the first time and becomes the main energy lineup
With its outstanding advantages of clean, low-carbon and high energy density, hydrogen energy has been included in the five-year plan for the first time, and its status in my country's energy landscape has also achieved an important leap.
Behind the changes in identity are changes in industry. The "China Hydrogen Energy Development Report (2026)" released not long ago has set the tone for hydrogen energy development during the "15th Five-Year Plan": anchoring the "new stage of large-scale development", hydrogen energy is moving from "policy-driven" to "market-driven". In Zhangjiagang, the contracted investment amount in the hydrogen energy industry reached 2.03 billion yuan in the first half of the year, doubling that of last year in half a year.
Today, my country's annual hydrogen production is more than 39 million tons, ranking first in the world; renewable energy hydrogen production capacity accounts for more than half of the world's. As production capacity increases, hydrogen energy has more and more application scenarios. In Zhangjiagang, a hydrogen-light complementary smart microgrid is operating stably.
The applications of hydrogen energy are not limited to the power grid. In the restaurant of a nursing home in Weifang, Shandong Province, the chefs are preparing lunch, and the flames mixed with hydrogen on the stove are even bluer.
In the "15th Five-Year Plan for New Energy System Construction", hydrogen transmission pipelines were included in key national new energy infrastructure projects. This is the first time that hydrogen transmission pipelines have been included in key projects. In the next five years, more hydrogen will enter thousands of households.
Zhang Lin, Director of the Planning and Development Department of the China Electricity Council: Currently, my country's green hydrogen production capacity accounts for more than half of the world's, and hydrogen energy is moving from "demonstration application" to "large-scale development." The next five years will be a critical period for hydrogen energy to turn to "market-driven". The rise of the entire industrial chain of "production, storage, transportation and use" of hydrogen energy contains green transformation and trillion-scale market opportunities.
New careers in hydrogen energy bring new opportunities for development
Not long ago, the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security announced a number of new occupations. In the list, two names related to the hydrogen energy industry appeared: "Water electrolysis hydrogen production worker" and "Hydrogen fuel cell manufacturer". What kind of development space will the new career open up?
In Duolun County, Xilingol League, Inner Mongolia, the country's first wind-solar hydrogen production project is now in operation. Here, the reporter met Chen Yueqi, a water electrolysis hydrogen production worker. He was explaining the process characteristics of green electricity hydrogen production equipment to young workers.
Xiao Chen, who had been working in the coal chemical industry for more than ten years because he saw room for development, switched jobs and became a water electrolysis hydrogen producer. At the beginning, the new job was quite challenging. Traditional chemical production is stable and easy to control, while green hydrogen production has to follow wind and solar power generation, which is sometimes strong and sometimes weak, requiring higher operation and safety requirements. In order to adapt to the new job, he stayed at the site for more than a month, tried again and again, took notes on data, and figured out a set of operating methods.
Today, Inner Mongolia's green hydrogen production capacity accounts for one-third of the country's total, ranking first. The growing industrial scale has also allowed the local area to speed up the training of professional talents. In the practical training classroom of this vocational and technical college in Inner Mongolia, students are learning the entire process from hydrogen production to power generation. This school not only opened a new major in hydrogen energy technology application, but also combined the new major with the original photovoltaic and chemical engineering majors to form a "wind, photovoltaic and hydrogen storage" new energy major group.
Today, there are already three higher vocational colleges in Inner Mongolia that offer hydrogen energy technology application majors. Among them, more than 80% of the students are connected with key local industries. The hydrogen energy industry is transforming into new opportunities for local high-quality development and local employment.
Reporters丨Sun Yuan Yang Yaoyu Yang Guang Xu Dawei Huhe Muren
