In this paper, the competitive swarm optimization (CSO) algorithm is applied for handling the economical load dispatch problem. The CSO algorithm is fundamentally encouraged by the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm, but it does not memorize the personal best and global best to update the swarms. Rather in CSO algorithm, a pairwise competitive scenario was presented, where the loser particle is updated from the winner particle and the winner particles are directly accepted to the next population. The algorithm has been performed to find the generations of different units in a plant to reduce the entire fuel price and to maintain the total demand as well as the losses. The experimental study and investigations have revealed better performance for the CSO algorithm than the PSO and numerous state-of-art meta-heuristic algorithms in solving the economical power dispatch problem. © 2019 IOS Press. All rights reserved.