In this paper, a new economic dispatch algorithm for unit commitment is proposed to improve both the accuracy of the final solution and the calculation speed of economic dispatch. By using the inverse incremental cost functions, economic dispatch can be transformed into a simple optimization problem associated with an n-th order polynomial equation. The proposed method remarkably reduces the computation time with adaptability to any higher order generation cost functions. The proposed method is tested with sample system, which shows that the proposed algorithm yields more accurate and economical generation scheduling results with high computation speed.