An attempt has been made for the effective application of biogeography based optimization and its modified version to solve load frequency control (LFC) problem. Two-area interconnected multi-unit multi-source power system having thermal, hydro and gas power plant without and with AC-DC link is considered for study. Proportional-integral-derivative controller is used as secondary controller in LFC system and its gains are tuned by proposed algorithms through minimization of integral time absolute error based objective function. The results confirm the effectiveness of proposed algorithms after comparing results with other evolutionary algorithms like differential evolution (DE), teaching learning based optimization (TLBO) for the similar test system. The robustness of proposed algorithm is checked with different objective functions like integral square error, integral absolute error, integral time square error criterions and under different loading conditions. Critical analysis of results reveals that proposed method gives better performance than that obtained with DE, TLBO.