the major of UE battery power consuming comes from transmitting on Uplink direction, the following points may be the answer of your question:
1- SC-FDMA technique has high spectral effciency compared to CDMA, so higher throughputs can be achieved.
2- In LTE, Discontinuous Reception (DRX) has been introduced as one of the key solutions to conserve battery power in mobile terminal, this is an advantages of Packet switching over Circuit switching that in packet switching Radio resources assigned only when IP layer has a packet ready to be sent, these is accomplished on RRC Layer which has two modes (RRC_CONNECTED and RRC_IDLE).
3- in addition, eNodeB use Power control which can reduce UE transmission power.