As an interconnected power system is subjected to rapid load disturbances with changing frequencies in the vicinity of the inter-area oscillation mode, a system frequency may be heavily disturbed and oscillate. Under the circumstances, the stabilizing effect of the conventional load frequency control (LFC), i.e. a governor, cannot be expected. To compensate for such load disturbances and stabilize frequency oscillations, the active power controlled by superconducting magnetic energy storage (SMES) can be applied. In this paper, a new optimization technique of a robust load frequency stabilizer equipped with SMES is presented. To enhance the robustness of the load frequency stabilizer against system uncertainties such as various load changes, system parameters variations etc., the multiplicative uncertainty is included in the system modeling. As a result, the robust stability of the stabilized system can be easily guaranteed in terms of the multiplicative stability margin (MSM). The configuration of the load frequency stabilizer is practically based on a second order lead/lag compensator with a single feedback input. The control parameters are automatically optimized by a tabu search algorithm, so that the desired damping ratio of the target inter-area mode and the best MSM are achieved. The simulation study exhibits the high robustness of the load frequency stabilizer against uncertainties. Moreover, a SMES unit requires small power capacity for frequency stabilization. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.