Graphical abstract AbstractMicro hydro power plant (MHP) is a small-scale hydropower (<100 kW) that has many advantages, especially are simple construction, low cost, reliable, can be built without the need for reservoirs, environmentally friendly, and is a renewable energy, so MHP today is mostly built for the needs of power plants in rural area. MHP is generally a isolated power plant, so the main problem is the change of load which will directly cause changes in the generator frequency and voltage , therefore are needed generator and turbine speed control system so that the frequency and output voltage of the generator can be kept constant despite the change of load. The control system at the MHP can be governor controller to regulate the discharge of incoming water turbine and Electronic Load Controller (ELC) to keep the generator load constant by adjusting the power dissipation to the dummy load, when there is a change of load on the consumers. The design and study of MHP control system has been done by a number of researchers with the aim of obtaining a control system design that has a fast response to achieve stability, effective, and efficient. This paper presents the results of the design and studies that have been done by some researchers on the control system at MHP. There are several methods in the control system such as governor control system with PD control, PID, artificial neural network-based PID, ELC control system, combined governor control system and fuzzy logic based ELC