Harmful ecological effects caused by the emission of gaseous pollutants like sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NO,), can be reduced by load adequate distribution between power plants. However, this leads to a noticeable increase in their operating cost. In order to eliminate this conflict, and to study the trade-off relation between fuel cost and emissions, an approach to solve this multiobjective environmental/economic load dispatch problem, based on an efficient successive linear programming technique is proposed. Simulation results on the Algerian 59-bus power system prove the efficiency of this method thus confirming its capacity to solve the environmental/economic power dispatch problem. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.