This paper presents short-term hydro scheduling method for hydrothermal coordination by genetic algorithms. Hydro scheduling problem has many constraints with fixed final reservoir volume. In this paper, the difficult water balance constraints caused by hydraulic coupling satisfied throughout dynamic decoding method. Adaptive penalizing method was also proposed to handle the infeasible solutions that violate various constraints. In this paper, we proposed GA to solve hydrothermal scheduling with appropriate decoding method and dynamic penalty method. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated in the case study.