Coal consumption curve of the thermal power plant can reflect the function relationship between the coal consumption of unit and load, which plays a key role for research on unit economic operation and load optimal dispatch. Now get coal consumption curve is generally obtained by least square method, but which are static curve and these curves remain unchanged for a long time, and make them are incompatible with the actual operation situation of the unit. Furthermore, coal consumption has the characteristics of typical nonlinear and time varying, sometimes the least square method does not work for nonlinear complex problems. For these problems, a method of coal consumption curve fitting of the thermal power plant units based on genetic algorithm is proposed. The residual analysis method is used for data detection; quadratic function is employed to the objective function; appropriate parameters such as initial population size, crossover rate and mutation rate are set; the unit’s actual coal consumption curves are fitted, and comparing the proposed method with least squares method, the results indicate that fitting effect of the former is better than the latter, and further indicate that the proposed method to do curve fitting can best approximate known data in a certain significance, and they can real-timely reflect the interdependence between power output and coal consumption.