Under the dual carbon goals, green innovation acts as a key driver for the transformation and upgrading of China’s energy-intensive enterprises, and stands as an inevitable choice to propel China’s shift from a major energy-consuming nation to a powerful scientific and technological nation. To explore the driving mechanism of digital transformation on the green innovation efficiency of energy-intensive enterprises, this paper takes such enterprises from 2011 to 2022 as the research subject, designs three distinct scenarios (environmental protection, enterprise innovation and scientific research innovation), simulates heterogeneous development paths, and forecasts trends to 2030. The results show that green innovation efficiency rises steadily across all scenarios, with the strongest improvement under the scientific research scenario. By 2030, efficiency under this scenario is expected to reach 1.77 times that of the baseline scenario, while the other two scenarios also perform significantly better. These findings confirm the positive role of multi-dimensional policy interventions in strengthening digital-enabled green innovation efficiency. Accordingly, practical recommendations are put forward regarding how digital transformation can effectively drive the improvement of green innovation efficiency of energy-intensive enterprises from the aspects of policy formulation, enterprise management and innovation investment.