AbstractThis work presents an energy management scheme (EMS) based on a rule-based grasshopper optimization algorithm (RB-GOA) for a solar-powered battery-ultracapacitor hybrid system. The main objective is to efficiently meet pulsed load (PL) demands and extract maximum energy from the photovoltaic (PV) array. The proposed approach establishes a simple IF-THEN set of rules to define the search space, including PV, battery bank (BB), and ultracapacitor (UC) constraints. GOA then dynamically allocates power shares among PV, BB, and UC to meet PL demand based on these rules and search space. A comprehensive study is conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed technique with other well-known swarm intelligence techniques (SITs) such as the cuckoo search algorithm (CSA), gray wolf optimization (GWO), and salp swarm algorithm (SSA). Evaluation is carried out for various cases, including PV alone without any energy storage device, variable PV with a constant load, variable PV with PL cases, and PV with maximum power point tracking (MPPT). Comparative analysis shows that the proposed technique outperforms the other SITs in terms of reducing power surges caused by PV power or load transition, oscillation mitigation, and MPP tracking. Specifically, for the variable PV with constant load case, it reduces the power surge by 26%, 22%, and 8% compared to CSA, GWO, and SSA, respectively. It also mitigates oscillations twice as fast as CSA and GWO and more than three times as fast as SSA. Moreover, it reduces the power surge by 9 times compared to CSA and GWO and by 6 times compared to SSA in variable PV with the PL case. Furthermore, its MPP tracking speed is approximately 29% to 61% faster than its counterparts, regardless of weather conditions. The results demonstrate that the proposed EMS is superior to other SITs in keeping a stable output across PL demand, reducing power surges, and minimizing oscillations while maximizing the usage of PV energy.