Energy–aware routing in wireless ad hoc networks is one of the demanding fields of research. Nodes of the network are battery operated that are difficult to recharge and replace, that's why while developing a routing protocol energy consumption metric should always be at high priority. Nodes of mobile ad hoc networks are distributed in different directions forming arbitrary topology instantly. To propose an energy-efficient routing protocol for such a dynamic, self-organized, self-configured, and self-controlled network is certainly a challenge and an open research problem. Energy constraints and mobility leading to link breakage are the motivating factors behind the development of the proposed Optimized Priority-based Ad Hoc on Demand Multi-path Distance Vector Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (OPAOMDV-EE). The routing protocol added three fields (CE, MAX_E, MIN_E) to the traditional AOMDV RREQ and RREP packets, which are further used for calculating total priority field value. This value is used by the source node for selecting an optimal prioritized energy-efficient route. The proposed OPAOMDV-EE protocol has been simulated on Network Simulator-2 (NS-2) for two different scenarios that prove the effectiveness of OPAOMDV-EE in terms of various performance metrics with reduced energy consumption.