In this paper, a new version of shuffle frog leaping algorithm (SFLA) which called modified SFLA (MSFIA) is proposed. To drive the proposed method both local and global search mechanisms in the original SFLA are modified. The local search mechanism is modified by introducing the movement inertia equation of particle swarm optimization (PSO). Furthermore, the global search mechanism is modified using the crossover and mutation operators of genetic algorithm (GA). Also, the formulation of the combined heat, emission and economic dispatch (CHEED) problem considering the availability of wind and solar power is presented where the objective functions of the CHEED problem are converted into a single objective function using price penalty function. Then, the proposed MSFIA is employed to solve the problem of CHEED with wind and solar power. To show the effectiveness of the proposed MSFIA, different test systems with different scenarios are used. In addition, the scalability of the proposed MSFLA is tested using large-scale test systems. The results of the proposed MSFLA are compared with those obtained by other heuristic and non-heuristic published methods. The comparison with other methods proves the efficiency and the superiority of the proposed MSFLA over other methods in all scenarios. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.