CHP (Combined heat and power) generation or cogeneration has been considered worldwide as the major alternative to traditional systems in terms of significant energy saving and environmental conservation. Furthermore, the wind power generators and photovoltaic units have vastly speared over the power systems due to their free inputs. However, there are many challenges for power system operators because of uncertain characteristics of renewable units and load demands. Therefore, a new multi-objective stochastic framework based on chance constrained programming is developed to handle combined heat and power economic load dispatch considering the stochastic characteristics of wind and photovoltaic power outputs, customer's electrical and heat load demands. The proposed technique makes use of a jointly distributed random variables method to calculate chance of meeting the electrical and heat load requirement using the target decision variables while maintaining the electrical energy cost below a scheduled value. The framework benefits from a new method named hybrid modified cuckoo search algorithm and differential evolution to extract the Pareto optimal surface for minimum cost and maximum probability of meeting the target cost and applies them as the objective functions. Applying to 6 and 40 unit test systems, the ability of the suggested framework is confirmed. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.