Abstract
Around the globe, power companies are obligated to make sure that customers' requests for electrical
energy are fulfilled in compliance with national laws. In order to meet the nation's load needs, they must also
make sure that electricity is produced at the lowest possible cost. Therefore, in order to ensure the system
operates economically, the entire load demand must be roughly divided among the producing units with the goal
of minimizing the system's overall generation cost. The process of determining the amount of electricity to be
produced by the dedicated generating units of a power system in order to reduce the system's overall production
cost while simultaneously meeting the load demand, equality, and inequality requirements is known as
economic load dispatch. The Ant Colony Search Algorithm (ACSA) method is used in this work to tackle the
economic load dispatch issue. A meta-heuristic method for resolving challenging combinatorial optimization
issues is called ACSA. This research used the Egbin Thermal Power Station in Nigeria as a case study with six
generating units to evaluate the suggested method, which was implemented in MATLAB code. The Lambda
technique and the ACSA outcome were compared. The results showed that the suggested algorithm is effective
in finding the best solution to the issues of power loss and operational costs.