Considering the varying operation conditions and ambient constraints, the in-depth energy conservation of thermal power units is confronting new challenges. Based on the already made ‘energy-consumption benchmark state’ concept, the description of energy-consumption benchmark state was obtained in this paper to describe the economic performance of coal-fired power thermal system with the varying operation boundary, operation conditions and equipment performance. Breaking the limitations of traditional modelling which always make statistic analysis and mechanism analysis isolate, hybrid modeling method synthesizing the merit of the mechanism analysis and statistical method was proposed. Considering the heat transfer characteristics of thermal system, this model make the energy-consumption of unit correspondence with parameter sets of thermal system. Optimized parameter sets were gained with the fuel specific consumption setting as the optimization objective, thus obtain the energy-consumption benchmark state in thermal system of coal-fired units. The results show that the method for determining energy-consumption benchmark state in the thermal system of coal-fired units based on hybrid model makes significant reference for the energy-saving diagnosis and operation optimization of thermal power units under overall working conditions.