Radio spectrum is the most valuable resource, and its effective utilization is essential to meet the increasing demand in wireless applications. Cognitive radio (CR) offers a promising solution for effective utilization of the available spectrum. In cognitive radio networks (CRN), spectrum sensing plays a decisive role. However, it is significantly affected in wireless environment, resulting low signal to noise ratio (SNR) at the receiver. Enhancing sensing performance even under low SNR has become a challenging research area, and cooperative spectrum sensing (CSS) is considered a favorable solution. In a CRN with CSS (CRN-CSS), multiple secondary users (SUs) participate in sensing and results are reported to a fusion center (FC), where a final decision on the status of the primary user (PU) is made according to a predetermined fusion rule such as AND, MAJORITY, and OR rules. The sensing performance in the CRN-CSS increases with the number of cooperating SUs. However, while increasing the number of SUs reduces energy efficiency, as sensing is done through multiple SUs and reporting these results to FC consumes additional energy. The proposed method enhances both sensing performance and energy efficiency by employing multiple FCs with the OR fusion rule. The sensing performance of CRN, CRN-CSS, and the proposed CRN-CSS (PCRN-CSS) were compared using receiver operating curves (ROCs). Also, the energy efficiency of the CRN-CSS and PCRN-CSS were presented for SNR = 0 dB and 10 dB. The results confirm that the present work enhances both spectrum sensing and energy efficiency under even low SNR scenarios.