Due to the flexibility

fast load adjustment

and other characteristics of hydropower station

hydropower has been used as the spinning reserve in the power grid.The economic operation of a hydropower station has become one of the important tasks for current grid systems.An economic operation model was established in this paper.The genetic algorithm（GA） was introduced into the simulated annealing（SA） algorithm to optimize the economic operation of the hydropower station and to solve the economic operation

and the joint and optimized dispatching problems.Various algorithms were used to calculate the economic operation of spinning reserve for a large hydropower station.The results show that the introduction of GA into SA has the advantages of fast convergence and high precision.It has certain practical value in the economic operation of large and medium hydropower stations.