The power industry is playing an increasingly important role in the world economy, and insufficient power supply may lead to huge enormous economic loss throughout the world. Then, the problem of power shortage is receiving a great deal of attention from operators and managers in electrical power system. With the merits of fast startup-shutdown, hydropower is regarded as one of the most reliable renewable energy sources to smooth the electricity shortage of power grid. Thus, this paper focuses on the operation of head-sensitive hydropower system considering power shortage aspect. To effectively address this problem, a novel method based on linear programming and successive approximation is proposed, where the initial hydraulic heads of each hydroplants is generated based on the actual working condition, and then the linear programming method is used to solve the fixed-head hydropower optimization problem involving a carefully-designed min-max optimization objective, while the successive approximation strategy is employed to incrementally improve the solution's quality by dynamically updating water heads of all the hydropower plants. The simulations demonstrate that compared with the original load demand, our method can make an average of approximate 20% reduction in electricity shortage of power system, demonstrating its effectiveness and practicability. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.