Cogeneration units, which produce both heat and electric power, are found in many process industries. These industries also consume heat directly in addition to electricity. The cogeneration units operate only within a feasible zone. Each point within the feasible zone consists of a specific value of heat and electric power. These units are used along with other units, which produce either heat or power exclusively. Hence, the economic dispatch problem for these plants to optimize the fuel cost is quite complex and several classical and meta-heuristic algorithms have been proposed earlier. This paper applies the firefly algorithm, which is inspired by the behavior of fireflies which attract each other based on their luminosity. The results obtained have been compared with those obtained by other methods earlier and showed a marked improvement over the earlier methods. © 2013 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.