Over the past decade, the ever-increasing energy demands of IT infrastructures have posed significant challenges for the research community in terms of reducing their total power consumption and minimizing their environmental impact. Optical communication networks are envisioned to be promising candidates to help preventing this problem affecting the Internet backbone, as well as for distributed applications such as computational grids. In this paper, we propose an adaptive and distributed scheme for the establishment of energy-efficient lightpaths in computational grids. The grid is deployed over an optical circuit-switched backbone network, defining an optical grid network. Each node of the backbone network maintains two different dynamic thresholds values and estimates the changes in network performance by evaluating the moving average of the total wavelength channel occupancy on all its input/output links. The nodes have the ability of reducing the energy consumption by entering into an Energy Saving Mode (ESM) on the basis of a comparison between their channel occupancy and the thresholds. Furthermore, we extend our framework by allowing the thresholds to be dynamically adapted depending on the network performance in terms of blocking probability. We show that the proposed method achieves considerable energy savings when compared to a normal energy-unaware operational mode and still allows to maintain an acceptable level of network performance in terms of blocking probability and end-to-end delay. Numerical results are obtained with a Java event-driven simulator of two different optical network topologies. © 2013-IOS Press and the authors. All rights reserved.