Summary
Renewable sources are deployed to meet the growing needs of the energy demand. Integration of these renewable sources in a power system leads to increased complexity due to which it is essential to adapt new control strategies to retain system stability by preserving frequency in a nominal value. Therefore, the objective of the work is to control the load frequency of an interconnected hybrid (wind, solar, thermal) power system by optimizing generator cost while implementing the demand management technique. Deviation in the frequency and tie‐line power due to fluctuation of renewable energy sources and load is addressed. For cost optimization, demand management technique was applied to the distribution system comprising flexible loads such as electric vehicle and heat pump. Voltage constraints and network congestion in the system are considered. The cascaded control technique is proposed for load frequency control and firefly based controller for cost optimization in the thermal power system. In the cascaded controller, proportional integral derivative (PID) and atom search optimization algorithm‐tuned PID controller are recommended. Performance of the projected approach is compared with a PID controller and fuzzy logic controller‐based load frequency control. Simulation studies and the result of various test cases considered clearly show the effectiveness of the controller implemented in the proposed system.