A network-coding-based scheme is proposed to improve the energy efficiency of distributed storage systems in WSNs (Wireless Sensor Networks). We mainly focus on two problems: firstly, consideration is given to effective distributed storage technology; secondly, we address how to effectively repair the data in failed storage nodes. For the first problem, we propose a method to obtain a sparse generator matrix to construct network codes, and this sparse generator matrix is proven to be the sparsest. Benefiting from this matrix, the energy consumption required to implement distributed storage is reduced. For the second problem, we designed a network-coding-based iterative repair method, which adequately utilizes the idea of re-encoding at intermediate nodes from network coding theory. Benefiting from the re-encoding, the energy consumption required by data repair is significantly reduced. Moreover, we provide an explicit lower bound of field size required by this scheme, which implies that it can work over a small field and the required computation overhead is very low. The simulation result verifies that the proposed scheme not only reduces the total energy consumption required to implement distributed storage system in WSNs, but also balances energy consumption of the networks.