This paper presents hybrid differential evolution (DE) and sequential quadratic programming (SQP) for solving the dynamic economic dispatch (DED) problem for generating units with valve-point effects. DE is used as a global optimizer and SQP is used as a fine tuning to determine the optimal solution at the final. The feasibility of the proposed method is validated with five-and ten-unit test systems. Results obtained by DE-SQP method are compared with other techniques in the literature.