Inter-relationships between mitigation and adaptation exist across many sectors and areas and it is a cost-effective way to detect synergistic relationships when addressing climate change. Through a literature review of the field,we found that most synergistic relationships among mitigation and adaptation can be managed and have cost-effective results at the level of region,province or sector. Due to the fact that research on adaptation is lagging that of mitigation, some problems with synergistic research on mitigation and adaptation measures exist,including sample problems,little quantified research tools for recognizing synergistic relationship and research boundaries. The energy system is both an acceptor and emitter of climate change impacts: a large number of spontaneous synergy and competition relationships were found in measures of mitigation and adaptation in this sector,which means further research is feasible. We suggest that people do more work on the meteorological disasters and risk assessment of the energy system, enlarging research samples of inter-relationships between mitigation and adaptation. Work is needed with other disciplinary tools to develop and explore quantitative methods to analyze the synergistic relationship between mitigation and adaptation measures mathematically. Research techniques and perspectives to identify synergistic relationships in the energy system can be a reference for related study and empirical work in other fields.