This paper studies energy-efficiency (EE) power allocation for cognitive radio MIMO-OFDM systems. Our aim is to minimize energy efficiency, measured by "Joule per bit" metric, while maintaining the minimal rate requirement of a secondary user under a total power constraint and mutual interference power constraints. However, since the formulated EE problem in this paper is non-convex, it is difficult to solve directly in general. To make it solvable, firstly we transform the original problem into an equivalent convex optimization problem via fractional programming. Then, the equivalent convex optimization problem is solved by a sequential quadratic programming algorithm. Finally, a new iterative energy-efficiency power allocation algorithm is presented. Numerical results show that the proposed method can obtain better EE performance than the maximizing capacity algorithm.