In this paper

genetic bacteria foraging hybrid algorithm（GA-BFO for short）of reactive power optimization of power system is proposed so to remain the advantages of Genetic Algorithm（GA） and Bacteria Foraging Optimization（BFO）and weaken their defects. The way of sort selection is selected for individual selection operation so to main diversity of the population and avoid the local optimum. The reactive power optimization calculation is performed for IEEE 30 node by the hybrid algorithm and its optimization result is compared with that of two kinds of single algorithm. It is shown by the result that GA-BFO algorithm ha good effectiveness and feasibility.