This paper demonstrates that the sensor cover energy problem in wireless communication can be transformed into a linear programming problem with max-plus linear inequality constraints. Consequently, by a well-developed preprocessing procedure, it can be further reformulated as a 0-1 integer linear programming problem and hence tackled by the routine techniques developed in linear and integer optimization. The performance of this two-stage solution approach is evaluated on a set of randomly generated instances and demonstrates that it is capable of solving large size instances of the sensor cover energy problem.