This paper developed a new method for solving the economic dispatch (ED) problems considering the valve-point effects in power systems. The method is based on a hybrid algorithm consisting of chaotic particle swarm optimization (CPSO) algorithm and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) techniques. The CPSO is the main optimizer of the algorithm and the SQP is used to fine tune its results to improve the solution. The proposed method was applied to three different cases of power systems. The economic effect, solution quality, convergence property and computation efficiency of the proposed method have been explored through the comparison with the existing techniques for the ED problems considering the valve-point effects. The simulation results demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to the practical ED problems. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.