In this paper, we develop a new class of high-order energy-preserving schemes for the Korteweg-de Vries equation based on the quadratic auxiliary variable technique, which can conserve the original energy of the system. By introducing a quadratic auxiliary variable, the original system is reformulated into an equivalent form with a modified quadratic energy, where the way of the introduced variable naturally produces a quadratic invariant of the new system. A class of Runge-Kutta methods satisfying the symplectic condition is applied to discretize the reformulated model in time, arriving at arbitrarily high-order schemes, which naturally conserve the modified quadratic energy and the produced quadratic invariant. Under the consistent initial condition, the proposed methods are rigorously proved to maintain the original energy conservation law of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In order to match the high order precision of time, the Fourier pseudo-spectral method is employed for spatial discretization, resulting in fully discrete energy-preserving schemes. To solve the proposed nonlinear schemes effectively, we present a very efficient practically-structure-preserving iterative technique, which not only greatly saves the calculation cost, but also achieves the purpose of practically preserving structure. Ample numerical results are addressed to confirm the expected order of accuracy, conservative property and efficiency of the proposed schemes. This new class of numerical strategies is rather general so that they can be readily generalized for any conservative systems with a polynomial energy.