The vision of the recently started GAMES European Re- search project is a new generation of energy efficient IT Service Centres, designed taking into account both the characteristics of the applications running in the centre and context-aware adaptivity features that can be enabled both at the application level and within the IT and utility infras- tructure. Adaptivity at the application is based on the service-oriented paradigm, which allows a dynamic composition and recomposition of ser- vices to guarantee Quality of Service levels that have been established with the users. At the infrastructure level, adaptivity is being sought with the capacity of switching on and off dynamically the systems com- ponents, based on the state of the service center. However, these two per- spectives are usually considered separately, managing at different levels applications and infrastructure. In addition, while performance and cost are usually the main parameters being considered both during design and at run time, energy efficiency of the service centre is normally not an issue. However, given that the impact of service centres is becom- ing more and more important in the global energy consumption, and that energy resources, in particular in peak periods, are more and more constrained, an efficient use of energy in service centres has become an important goal. In the GAMES project, energy efficiency improvement goals are tackled based on exploiting adaptivity, on building a knowledge base for evaluating the impact of the applications on the service centre energy consumption, and exploiting the application characteristics for an improved use of resources.