Concern for the environment necessitates the reduction in use of fossil fuels. A solution is to use more renewable power generation facilities. However, the intermittency of renewable energy makes operational scheduling challenging. An optimization model is developed here to determine the performance of a hydro-thermal-wind-solar hybrid power system with the possibility of integrating a compressed air energy storage system. The hybrid power system is implemented in the IEEE-30 bus system. Real-time operational constraints such as varying renewable power availability and disruptions are considered. The model was solved using the meta-heuristic approaches of differential evolution and modified bacteria foraging algorithm. Results indicate that the modified bacteria foraging algorithm arrived at better solutions, making it possible to achieve lower power loss, higher annual savings and reduced variability in voltage security. The best performance is obtained using a hybrid power system which incorporates the compressed air energy storage. Results indicate that higher renewable energy penetration with proper scheduling strategy can result in improvements in system performance. © 2020 Elsevier Ltd