This paper is aimed at exploring the performance of the different evolutionary programming (EP) techniques for all kinds of economic dispatch (ED) problems. The three EP techniques considered here differ in the kind of mutation they use: Gaussian, Cauchy and combined Gaussian-Cauchy mutation. The kinds of problems tested are: ED of generators with prohibited operating zones (POZ), ED of generators with piecewise quadratic cost functions (PQCF), combined economic-environmental dispatch (CEED) and multi-area economic dispatch (MAED). The three EP techniques have been developed in Matlab 6.5 and numerical examples typical to each kind of ED have been tested. The simulation results are compared and discussed to show the relative performances of the different EP techniques. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.