Abstract Renewable energy systems are proving to be promising and environment friendly sources of electricity generation, particularly, in countries with inadequate fossil fuel resources. In recent years, wind, solar photovoltaic (PV) and biomass based systems have been drawing more attention to provide electricity to isolated or energy deficient regions. This paper presents a hybrid PV-wind generation system along with biomass and storage to fulfill the electrical load demand of a small area. For optimal sizing of components, a recently introduced swarm based artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm is applied. To verify the strength of the proposed technique, the results are compared with the results obtained from the standard software tool, hybrid optimization model for electric renewable (HOMER) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. It has been verified from the results that the ABC algorithm has good convergence property and ability to provide good quality results. Further, for critical case such as the failure of any source, the behavior of the proposed system has been observed. It is evident from the results that the proposed scheme is able to manage a smooth power flow with the same optimal configuration.