Economic dispatch (ED) is one of the important problems in the operation and management of the electric power systems which is formulated as an optimization problem. Modern heuristics stochastic optimization techniques appear to be efficient in solving ED problem without any restriction because of their ability to seek the global optimal solution. One of modern heuristic algorithms is particle swarm optimization (PSO). In PSO algorithm, particles change place to get close to the best position and find the global minimum point. Also, differential evolution (DE) is a robust statistical method for solving non-linear and non-convex optimization problem. The fast convergence of DE degrades its performance and reduces its search capability that leads to a higher probability towards obtaining a local optimum. In order to overcome this drawback a hybrid method is presented to solve the ED problem with valve-point loading effect by integrating the variable DE with the fuzzy adaptive PSO called FAPSO-VDE. DE is the main optimizer and the PSO is used to maintain the population diversity and prevent leading to misleading local optima for every improvement in the solution of the DE run. The parameters of proposed hybrid algorithm such as inertia weight, mutation and crossover factors are adaptively adjusted. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed hybrid algorithm is demonstrated for two case studies and results are compared with those of other methods. It is shown that FAPSO-VDE has high quality solution, superior convergence characteristics and shorter computation time. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.