Abstract This paper presents a deterministic optimization strategy to solve the economic-environmental power dispatch (EEPD) problem of an electrical power system, using a Broyden Fletcher Goldfarb Shanno based on the augmented Lagrangian (BFGS-AL) algorithm. This problem is a nonlinear constrained multi-objective optimization. The objectives of this optimization are minimized the total fuel cost and emission amount for thermal generators while satisfying electric power systems equality and inequality constraints. The proposed approach is applied on the standard IEEE 30 bus test system, where the power transmission losses are taken into account. Simulation results proved that the proposed approach gives better-quality solution in terms of accuracy and convergence to the best compromise solution compared to other deterministic and meta-heuristic optimization techniques.