ELD (Economic Load Dispatch) is the process of allocating the required load between the available generation units such that the cost of operation is minimized. The ELD problem is formulated as a nonlinear constrained optimization problem with both equality and inequality constraints. The dual objective CEED (Combined Economic Emission Dispatch) problem is considering the environmental impacts that accumulated from emission of gaseous pollutants of fossil-fueled power plants. In this paper, an implementation of FPA (Flower Pollination Algorithm) to solve ELD and CEED problems in power systems is discussed. Results obtained by the proposed FPA are compared with other optimization algorithms for various power systems. The results introduced in this paper show that the proposed FPA outlasts other techniques even for large scale power system considering valve point effect in terms of total cost and computational time. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.