Porous carbon has attracted great interest because of its distinctive structure and superior properties for designing electrochemical energy storage devices. In this work, we report a novel and facile method to fabricate nitrogen-doped porous carbon (NPC) with designed hierarchical multi-porous structure. The NPC is prepared using a facile and scalable MgO template method as-mediated by a magnesium nitrate-glycine solution combustion synthesis (SCS), in which the preparation conditions of calcination temperature and glycine-nitrate ratio are carefully studied. The NPC shows a high specific surface area up to 1958 m(2) g(-1) and contains hierarchical multi-pores of interconnected macro-, meso-and micro-pores. When applied as ORR electrocatalyst, the NPC-n2-1000 sample shows the highest activity, good durability and high tolerance against methanol, which is among the best reported carbon-base catalysts. The NPC samples also shows great potential as the active electrode material for supercapacitors. NPC-n2-900 sample exhibits a high specific capacitance of 232 F g(-1) at 1 A g(-1) in 6 M KOH electrolyte, a superior rate capability (205 F g(-1) at 10 A g(-1)) and a good cycling performance. The present work demonstrates that the combination of glycine-nitrate SCS and template introduction in one-step can turn the carbohydrate fuel to advanced porous carbon with prospective applications in high-performance energy storage devices.