Clustering can be used as an effective technique to achieve both energy load balancing and an extended lifetime for a wireless sensor network (WSN). This paper presents a novel approach that first creates energy balanced fixed/static clusters, and then, to attain energy load balancing within each fixed cluster, rotates the role of cluster head through uniformly quantized energy levels based approach to prolong the overall network lifetime. The method provided herein, not only provides near-dynamic clustering performance but also reduces the complexity due to the fact that cluster formation phase is implemented once. The presented simulation results clearly show the efficacy of this proposed algorithm and thus, it can be used as a practical approach to obtain maximized network lifetime for energy balanced clusters in fixed clustering environments. © 2012 IEEE.