Under the background of carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, the application of intelligent technology in the field of hydropower station operation and maintenance has received wide attention from the industry. In order to meet this challenge, this work proposed a key technology based on intelligent portal crane of hydropower station gates “one key opening and closing”. In this work, we took the traditional gantry crane as the research object, and implemented the intelligent crane generalised system and personalised system modification to achieve the purpose of one-click opening and closing of the gates, reduction of personnel operation and hot standby control system for 7  \(\times \)  24 h. This innovation not only improves the safety and operational efficiency of the gate opening and closing,operations of the hydropower plant, but also provides a new solution to the problem of preventing the escape of hydroelectric power plant turbine units, and significantly improves the intrinsic safety level of the hydroelectric power plant to prevent flooding of the plant.