Real and reactive power deficiencies due to generation and overload contingencies in a power system may decline the system frequency and the system voltage. During these contingencies cascaded failures may occur which will lead to complete blackout of certain parts of the power system. Under such situations load shedding is considered as an emergency control action that is necessary to prevent a blackout in the power system by relieving overload in some parts of the system. The aim of this paper is to minimize the amount of load shed during generation and overload contingencies using a new meta-heuristic optimization algorithm known as artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC). The optimal solution for the problem of steady state load shedding is done by taking squares of the difference between the connected and supplied real and reactive power. The supplied active and reactive powers are treated as dependent variables modeled as functions of bus voltages only. The proposed algorithm is tested on IEEE 14, 30, 57, and 118 bus test systems. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated by comparison with the other conventional methods reported earlier in terms of solution quality and convergence properties. The comparison shows that the proposed algorithm gives better solutions and can be recommended as one of the optimization algorithms that can be used for optimal load shedding. © 2015 Penerbit UTM Press. All rights reserved.