This paper develops a simulated annealing based multi-objective cultural differential evolution (SA-MOCDE) for solving daily hydrothermal operation scheduling with economic emission (SHOSEE) while considering water transport delay and transmission loss of system load, and it is formulated for optimizing thermal cost and emission issue with complex non-convex constraints. The simulated annealing technique is integrated into the multi-objective differential computation model motivated by redesigned cultural knowledge structures, and it can be used to avoid the premature convergence by properly controlling the population space evolution. For testifying the convergence ability and diversity distribution of the proposed algorithm, various benchmark functions are used to verify the stable efficiency of complex constraint-handling and high-dimensional search ability. The implementation of the proposed SA-MOCDE on SHOSEE problem proves that more desirable fuel cost and emission cost are obtained by SA-MOCDE in comparison to other established method recently, and the analysis on the running performance of convergence and diversity metric also reveals that SA-MOCDE can be a promising alternative for solving SHOSEE problem. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.