This paper presents opposition-based differential evolution to determine the optimal hourly schedule of power generation in a hydrothermal system. Differential evolution (DE) is a population-based stochastic parallel search evolutionary algorithm. Opposition-based differential evolution has been used here to improve the effectiveness and quality of the solution. The proposed opposition-based differential evolution (ODE) employs opposition-based learning (OBL) for population initialization and also for generation jumping. The effectiveness of the proposed method has been verified on two test problems, two fixed head hydrothermal test systems and three hydrothermal multi-reservoir cascaded hydroelectric test systems having prohibited operating zones and thermal units with valve point loading. The results of the proposed approach are compared with those obtained by other evolutionary methods. It is found that the proposed opposition-based differential evolution based approach is able to provide better solution.