China's 15th Five-Year Plan announces 200 trillion yuan energy investment target, signaling domestic AI infrastructure power commitment.
On June 26th, China's state-priority Dujiangyan Hydropower Station brought its first unit online — a facility boasting the world's highest concrete dam at 315 meters, with installed capacity of 2 million kilowatts and annual power generation reaching 7.7 billion kilowatt-hours. When CCTV News reported on this "megaproject," it adopted AI-generated visualization content produced by the Foreseeing Energy team to educate the public about China's major dams.
That same day, National Energy Administration Director Wang Hongzhi disclosed at a State Council Information Office briefing that total investment across "15th Five-Year Plan" energy projects and new business models is expected to exceed 20 trillion yuan.
These two achievements paint a clear picture of China's energy transition: at the engineering level, the world's highest dam begins generating power; at the policy level, 20 trillion yuan in investment stands ready. Yet the flip side reveals a significant information gap—what these massive projects built in deserts, on offshore platforms, and in remote mountains actually mean to ordinary citizens remains poorly communicated.
The integration of AI visualization into CCTV's hydropower reporting, and its positive reception, illustrates a crucial reality: as new energy develops, the industry's challenge may not be technology, but finding a way to communicate that ordinary people can understand and trust.
In the Dujiangyan coverage, the AI educational segment was brief—roughly 90 seconds—presenting China's 94,000+ dams through visualization of their distribution and types. This itself sends a signal: even a project crowned "world-first" cannot complete its dialogue with the public through engineering data alone.
Hydropower has long faced a "hard to explain" problem. How dams hold water, how they generate electricity, how fish migrate—each step requires specialized knowledge to convey. The industry traditionally relied on two approaches: aerial footage, which leaves viewers with only an impression of "impressive scale," or educational articles, which are carefully written but rarely reach wide audiences.
Jinchuan Hydropower Station attempted a different approach when its first unit went online in May. The facility, with 860,000 kilowatts of installed capacity and a 112-meter-high dam, includes Asia's longest biomimetic fish ladder—5.02 kilometers, composed of natural tributaries and artificial tunnels. In CCTV's coverage, the Foreseeing Energy team used AI-generated visualization to reveal the ladder's internal structure, taking viewers on a flythrough that shows sectioning and water flow design.
AI visualization's value lies in "translation"—converting engineering blueprints and design reports into scenes people can grasp intuitively. Information about what fish ladders look like, how they function, whether fish actually use them—most of this historically remained locked in design documents, invisible and incomprehensible to the public. AI's contribution is concrete: breaking complex structures into understandable visuals. Content requiring paragraphs to describe in text can be shown in seconds.
That said, the technology remains immature. AI-generated content sometimes follows rigid patterns, and viewers easily tire of the aesthetic. More critically, some AI content appears smooth on the surface yet contains factual errors. For energy reporting, scientific inaccuracy damages the entire narrative's credibility. AI visualization is a tool that helps the industry explain "what we did," but it cannot replace actual facts or substitute for professional reporting and review.
The "New Energy System Construction 15th Five-Year Plan" is an intensely pragmatic document. It mandates six key areas: building an advanced, well-matched new energy infrastructure system; establishing a robust, resilient energy security system; creating a green, low-carbon energy consumption system; achieving self-reliant energy science and technology innovation; enabling coordinated, efficient modern energy governance; and fostering diverse, multi-dimensional international energy cooperation. Spatially, it promotes non-fossil energy supply through "four bases plus distributed" five growth zones, implementing a decade-long non-fossil energy doubling campaign with a 2030 target of accommodating 900 million kilowatts of distributed new energy capacity.
Each of these targets demands real capital investment. For 20 trillion yuan to materialize, efficiency becomes the critical metric—and efficiency's first barrier often lies not in technology but in whether surrounding communities understand and accept projects.
The Hangzhou Jiufeng garbage incineration and power generation project faced fierce neighborhood opposition when construction began in 2014, triggering large-scale protests. Solar installations have similarly sparked controversy over light pollution, with extensive panels creating intense glare at certain angles, disrupting residents' lives. These cases illustrate a simple truth: build an engineering project without public buy-in, and trouble follows.
Taishan Nuclear Power Station offers a replicable solution. Through the "We Are One Family with Nuclear Power" party-building partnership, the surrounding "three nuclear villages" effectively resolved the "not in my backyard" effect—transforming it into enthusiastic local support, establishing the nation's first "zero-carbon model village" around a nuclear facility. The approach is straightforward: invite residents to tour the plant, have professionals explain operating mechanisms and safety systems. Once understanding breaks through, attitudes shift.
Foreseeing Energy identifies the current science-communication bottleneck: project developers view education as an added expense, local governments see it as outside their mandate, and the public wants information but lacks reliable channels. With misaligned incentives, when projects stall, a single day of shutdown costs more than a year's science communication budget.
Tiantai Pumped-Storage Power Station took four years from May 2022 groundbreaking to June 2026 operation. Had a systematic AI education mechanism continuously delivered localized content during those four years—short videos explaining principles, interactive pages presenting data—project advancement might have faced fewer obstacles.
At the national level, on June 16th, the National Energy Administration convened a nuclear science-communication work conference where the "Green Nuclear Energy" platform formally launched. Established under guidance from the National Energy Administration and Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the platform was jointly initiated by the China Nuclear Power Development Center, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment's Nuclear and Radiation Safety Center, and the China Nuclear Society, with China National Nuclear Corporation, China Huaneng, State Power Investment Corporation, and China Guangdong Nuclear Power as principal participants.
The conference clearly articulated that quality nuclear science communication builds consensus and boosts social acceptance. It identified four priorities: deepening content creation to tell China's nuclear story well; innovating communication methods with tiered, precision-targeted education; improving openness of science-communication facilities and strengthening public platforms; and cultivating science-communication talent.
This marks the National Energy Administration's first elevation of science communication to such prominence. Yet the "Green Nuclear Energy" platform currently covers only nuclear power. Pumped-storage, offshore wind, "sand-Gobi-desert" base projects, and integrated wind-light-hydrogen-ammonia-methanol ventures face equivalent knowledge gaps requiring far more education.
Yixing Pumped-Storage Power Station attempted one approach—organizing family tours where children witnessed "double electricity generation from a single water drop." Yang Bin, equipment department head, offered this thought: "Rooted in green mountains and waters, bridging clean energy and public understanding through science communication is our station's ecological responsibility." One tour reaches dozens of families; against thousands of projects under the 20 trillion yuan plan, the gap yawns wide.
AI can bridge that gap. The 15th Five-Year Plan explicitly calls for deepening "AI+" energy action. AI applications in energy have expanded from generation forecasting and intelligent dispatch to equipment maintenance. Yet AI holds an underestimated capacity—science communication itself. Some organizations have produced compressed-air energy storage educational videos through AIGC, framed as a retired engineer grandfather telling his granddaughter a story, translating complex technology into accessible narrative. Nuclear science-communication large models and AIGC educational microdramas are being piloted. But these efforts remain insufficient in scale. A few videos, a few models, cannot match 20 trillion yuan's investment magnitude.
The National Energy Administration has taken the first step. The significance of "Green Nuclear Energy" platform formation lies not in itself but in what it acknowledges: new energy development requires not just cable-laying and power plants, but the cultivation of public understanding and trust. The questions now are whether this logic extends from nuclear to all energy sectors, and whether it can become institutionalized practice rather than a one-time initiative.
On the day Dujiangyan came online, the grid gained a 7.7-billion-kilowatt-hour-per-year generating unit. But perhaps more urgent than installed capacity is closing the information gap. In a 20 trillion yuan investment, every yuan seeks return. The return on science-communication spending may be the highest of all.