In this paper, we propose a general framework to evaluate and compare both throughput and energy efficiency of mobile ad hoc networks. This framework is built upon a probabilistic, energy-aware, calculus for the analysis of broadcast, unicast and multicast wireless communications. The results of our analyses can be used to replace a network component with a more efficient one - with respect to different metrics like throughput and energy consumption - while maintaining connectivity. As an application, we evaluate two well-known automatic repeat request (ARQ)-based error control protocols: stop-and-wait (SW) and go-back-N (GBN).