Energy consumption is one of the most important issues to the wireless sensor network, which determines the network lifetime. The non-uniform property of energy consumption is studied in this paper. Theoretical analysis indicates that the average energy consumption of the sensor is heavy non-uniform, which decrease with the hop number to the sink node (or the sensor belongs to the high level in a heterogeneous sensor network). In a wireless sensor network, the energy utilization rate is very low while the coefficient of energy waste is very high, which are monotone decreasing and increasing with the hop number to the sink node (or the sensor belongs to the high level in a heterogeneous sensor network) respectively. We concentrate on the energy consumption of the grid network and the random network which has uniform distribution. The definitions of efficient energy and residual energy of, energy utilization rate and energy waste coefficient of the sensor network are given. Then the relationship between the energy utilization rate and the maximal network hop number are analyzed in both grid sensor network and random uniform sensor network. When the hop number reaches 3, the residual energy is much larger than the energy used for sensing and transmitting the packet. As the random network is concerned, the energy wasted is much heavier than that in the grid network. For the purpose of energy conservation, a tuning transmission radii solution scheme is proposed. As an application, a semi-grid sensor network is constructed and a routing algorithm is designed. Compared result shows that this scheme can reduce the residual energy and prolong the network lifetime remarkably.