AbstractInclusion of intermittent natured renewable energy resources in microgrid to reduce global warming, especially in shipboard power system and due to highly fluctuating propulsion load, frequency control strategy of isolated shipboard hybrid microgrid (ISHMG) is major point of attraction. Hence, a power system of marine vessel with dish‐stirling solar thermal system (DSTS), wind‐driven generation (WDG), solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC), super‐conducting magnetic energy storage (SMES), two different AC‐loads, and propulsion loads are considered as an ISHMG. The main objective of this paper is reducing the mismatch between generation and demand with the help of fractional‐order proportional integral‐derivative (FOPID) controller. To improve the frequency control, the tuning of the controller coefficients plays a major role as the controller's performance fully dependent on the parameters. Accordingly, the recently developed butterfly optimization algorithm (BOA) has been used to optimize the FOPID controller's parameters. Comparative analysis of several techniques like FA, PSO, GOA, SSA, and BOA used for PID, PI, FOPID controllers' optimization, and sensitivity analysis under different parametric variation has been presented to prove the stability of the ISHMG model. Analyzing all the results, it is found that BOA‐based FOPID controller is performing the frequency control far better than other techniques.