In this paper we present preliminary results on systemlevel analysis of power efficiency in FPGA-based designs. Advanced FPGA devices allow implementation of sophisticated systems (eg embedded sensor nodes). However, designing such complex applications is prohibitively expensive at lower levels so that, moving the designing process to higher abstraction layers, ie system-levels of design, is a rational decision. This paper shows that at least a certain level of power awareness is achievable at these higher abstractions. A methodology and preliminary results for a power-aware, system-level algorithm partitioning is presented. We select data reduction algorithms as the case study because of their importance in wireless sensor networks (WSN’s). Although, the research has been focused on WSN applications of FPGA, it is envisaged that the presented ideas are applicable to other untethered embedded systems based on FPGA’s and other similar programmable devices.