Integration of renewable energy systems to the existing power grid has become an inevitable issue all over the world. Besides its advantages, it brings serious problems such as system frequency and tie-line power fluctuations which may result in instability or undesired situations in a power system. On the other hand, cascaded controller structures have become so popular in the literature. Because they have more degree of freedom resulting in increased flexibility according to the non-cascaded ones. Within the above-given explanations, in this study, we aim to investigate the performances of cascaded fractional and integer order controllers TI-TD and PI-PD compared to the non-cascaded ones PID and TID controllers for a two area PV-Thermal reheat power system. The designed Article Title controllers are optimized by the Mayfly algorithm (MA) to minimize the integral of the time-weighted absolute error (ITAE) performance index. A detailed performance task is considered for the controllers. These are time domain analysis, robustness, random load change, progressive nonlinearities, and cyber attack issues. The nonlinearity analysis consists of governor dead band (GDB), generation rate constraints (GRC), boiler dynamics (BD), and time delay (TD). Also, two cyber-attack models called a resonance attack (ResA) and random attack (RndA) are applied to the controller systems. Simulation results show the superiority of the optimized and cascaded controllers, especially for TI-TD controller. The performance result of the controllers is also verified by comparing each other and some reported controllers in the literature.