Recently security issues like investment and financing in China's power industry have become increasingly prominent, bringing serious challenges to the financial security of the domestic power industry. Thus, it deserves to develop financial safety evaluation towards the Chinese power industry and is of practical significance. In this paper, the GA (genetic algorithm) is used to optimize the connection weights and thresholds of the traditional BPNN (back propagation neural network) so the new model of BPNN based on GA is established, hereinafter referred to as GA-BPNN (back propagation neural network based on genetic algorithm). Then, an empirical example of the electric power industry in China during the period 2003-2010 was selected to verify the proposed algorithm. By comparison with three other algorithms, the results indicate the model can be applied to evaluate the financial security of China's power industry effectively. Then index values of the financial security of China's power industry in 2011 were obtained according to the tested prediction model and the comprehensive safety scores and grades are calculated by the weighted algorithm. Finally, we analyzed the reasons and throw out suggestions based on the results. The work of this paper will provide a reference for the financial security evaluation of the energy industry in the future. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.