As a consequence of developing information and communication technology that is playing a significant role in our society and has changed our life dramatically, we witnessed a significant increase in energy consumption in computer systems and networks. Subsequently, energy harvesting technologies with renewable energy are of great interest in the field of computer systems and networks, and thus lead to abundant research which has been carried out to address energy harvesting from different aspects. However, the majority of them focuses on wireless or small-scale networks, which left wired networks with a general structure neglected. We first present a comprehensive systemic review of the trends of overall energy consumption, and energy and quality of service optimization in computer systems and networks. Then, this paper reviews the recent research progress in G-networks and energy packet networks with renewable and intermittent energy from both the system paradigms and the performance optimization and energy reduction algorithms for the wired networks.