With the explosive growth and need for high-speed wireless communications, more and more energy is consumed to support the required quality of service. Therefore, energy efficient or green communication has become a very hot topic under the ground of limited energy resource and environmentally friendly transmission schemes. MIMO technique is capable of reducing the transmission power thanks to its diversity and multiplexing gain. Moreover, antenna selection (AS) is an alternative to extract many of the benefits in MIMO systems with a reduced cost of complexity and power. Although many works including several survey papers have investigated AS in MIMO systems, the goal of these works is only the capacity maximization or error rate minimization, which fails to guarantee the optimality of the energy efficiency in MIMO systems. In this paper, we overview the state of the art in the AS schemes in energy efficient MIMO systems, the goal of which is to optimize the energy efficiency of the whole system. Specifically, we introduce energy efficient AS in point-to-point MIMO, cooperative MIMO, multiuser MIMO and largescale MIMO systems, respectively. Several challenging and practical issues in this area are also addressed.