Load frequency control (LFC) plays a very important role in providing quality power both in the case of isolated as well as interconnected power systems. In order to maintain good quality power supply, the LFC should possess robustness toward the parametric uncertainty of the system and good disturbance rejection capability. The fractional order controller has the properties such as, eliminating steady state error, robustness toward plant gain variations and also good disturbance rejection. This makes the fractional order PID (FOPID) controller quite suitable for the LFC. Therefore, in this paper a FOPID is designed for single area LFC for all three types of turbines i.e., non-reheated, reheated and hydro turbines. It is observed that the FOPID controller shows better robustness toward 50% parametric uncertainty and disturbance rejection capability than the existing techniques. Finally, the optimization of controller parameters and robustness evaluation of the control technique is done on the basis of the integral error criterion. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.