Abstract To date, significant effort has gone into designing green traffic engineering (TE) techniques that consolidate traffic onto the minimal number of links/switches/routers during off-peak periods. However, little works exist that aim to green Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) capable networks. Critically, no work has studied the performance of green label switched paths (LSPs) establishment methods in terms of energy savings and acceptance rates. Henceforth, we add to the current state-of-the-art by studying green online and offline (LSP) establishment methods. Online methods rely only on past and current LSP requests while offline ones act as a theoretical benchmark whereby they also have available to them future LSP requests. We introduce a novel metric that takes into account both energy savings and acceptance rates. We also identify a new simpler heuristic that minimizes energy use by routing source–destination demands over paths that contain established links and require the fewest number of new links. Our evaluation of two offline and four online LSP establishment methods over the Abilene and AT&T topologies with random LSP setup requests show that energy savings beyond 20 % are achievable with LSP acceptance rates above 90 %.