In order to improve the deficiencies of the traditional symbolic positioning method and position the disturbance source accurately when the disturbance information is unreliable, a positioning algorithm of power quality disturbance source based on the genetic algorithm is proposed. Through analyzing the mechanism of the high frequency component of the disturbance signal, the high frequency components are extracted by using wavelet transform, and the polarity of the high frequency disturbance energy is used as the discrimination basis for the disturbance direction, a general algorithm of the disturbance determination is given. According to the topology of the system and the arrangement of monitoring points, an optimization model of the disturbance source localization is established. It makes the disturbance source location problem transform into 0-1 integer programming problem and uses the genetic algorithm to get the results. The simulation results show that this method has accurate orientation and strong fault tolerant ability etc, which provides a new solution for the disturbance source location problem.