Due to the randomicity of wind power energy, the voltage flicker of power grid will occur when large-scale wind power connected to the power grid. By constructing its predict-filter and update-filter, a method to detect the flicker based on adaptive lifting wavelet transform is proposed in the paper. In order to adaptively select the wavelet function and match the signal feature better, an updation/prediction adaptive lifting wavelet transform is proposed. In the method, an adaptive updation/prediction lifting scheme is designed to realize adaptive updation and prediction respectively by using the local gradient information of original signal and minimum prediction error. Simulation results show that the method can track voltage flicker rapidly, exactly and real-timely. (C) 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Selection and/or peer-review under responsibility of [CEIS 2011]