Abstract： Gateway utilization is low in hybrid opticalwireless broadband access networks. Therefore, the energy efficiency can be effectively enhanced by employing the gateway sleep scheduling mechanism at the expense of increasing the system delay. In this paper, a novel adaptive energy saving mechanism with delay aware in hybrid opticalwireless broadband access networks was proposed based on the delay tolerance feature of data. In order to fully exploit the delay tolerance feature of data, and to adaptively determine the sleeping interval according to arrival rate, the queuing theory model was introduced to analyse the energy consumption and the data gateway latency. Meanwhile, to achieve the energy efficiency, the path reconstruction delay and congestion rate were dramatically reduced by the proposed multigateway loadbalance mechanism. The results show that the proposed mechanism can reduce the total energy consumption of gateways by 36%. Besides, the utilization rate of the gateway is effectively improved and the path delay is reduced.