A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes. It can be constructed anywhere without any infrastructure. The mobile nodes are equipped with energylimited batteries. An important issue in such a network is to minimize the total energy consumption for each operation. In MANET each node acts as a store and forward station for routing packets. As the nodes are highly dynamic, maintaining routes become a greater challenge.Multicasting is one of the fundamental mechanism, which can be typically implemented by creating a multicast tree. It is achieved by forming minimum spanning tree between the source nodes and other mobile nodes in the network and then data is transmitted over this minimum path. In this paper we are focusing on designing energy efficient routing algorithms for creating minimum spanning tree. It first uses AODV as basic protocol, then we are designing a distributed algorithm for finding the approximate distance between nodes. We have conducted experiments by simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm and compare it with the basic AODV. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces energy consumption, delay and improves throughput and packet delivery ratio.