Abstract Energy efficiency (EE) is becoming one of the important criteria in wireless transmission design. This paper discusses the recently proposed energy-efficient transmit beamforming designs for multicell multiuser multiple-input single-output (MISO) systems, including maximizing overall network EE, sum weighted EE and fairness EE. Generally, the EE optimization problems are NP-hard nonconvex programs for which finding the globally optimal solutions is challenging. For low-complexity suboptimal approaches, there is a class of solutions conventionally developed based on parametric transformations. However, those have been revealed problematic in terms of computational complexity and convergence. To overcome these issues, novel algorithms have been recently developed based on the state-of-the-art successive convex approximation (SCA) framework. Here we sum up the basic concepts of the algorithms and provide numerical results which illustrate the solution quality compared to the existing methods.