Energy cost has been increasing rapidly to comply with environmental regulations worldwide and the manufacturing industry who consumes more than half of the total energy needs to improve their cost competitiveness considering environmental costs. Machine tools are essential elements in manufacturing industry and efforts have been made recently to increase their energy efficiency mainly by German and Japanese machine tool builders. In this paper, trends in energy saving technology are described on the hardware and software sides of peripheral equipment of machine tools. In addition, the power consumption of a machining center is measured and analyzed to develop a software-based standby strategy for energy saving with peripheral equipment of machine tools.