This paper suggests a new methodology of evolutionary computations - an Adaptive Evolutionary Algorithm (AEA) for solving the Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) problem which has piecewise quadratic cost functions and prohibited operating zones with many local minima. AEA uses a genetic algorithm (GA) and an evolution strategy (ES) in an adaptive manner in order to take merits of two different evolutionary computations: global search capability of GA and local search capability of ES. In the reproduction procedure, proportions of the population by GA and the population by ES are adaptively modulated according to the fitness. Case studies illustrate the superiority of the proposed methods to existing conventional methods in power generation cost and computation time. The results demonstrate that the AEA can be applied successfully in the solution of ELD with piecewise quadratic cost functions and prohibited operating Bones