Hybrid photovoltaic (PV)-wind turbine (WT) systems with battery storage have been introduced as a green and reliable power system for remote areas. There is a steady increase in usage of hybrid energy system (HES) and consequently optimum sizing is the main issue for having a cost-effective system. This paper evaluates the performance of different evolutionary algorithms for optimum sizing of a PV/WT/battery hybrid system to continuously satisfy the load demand with the minimal total annual cost (TAC). For this aim, all the components are modeled and an objective function is defined based on the TAC. In the optimization problem, the maximum allowable loss of power supply probability (LPSPmax) is also considered to have a reliable system, and three well-known heuristic algorithms, namely, particle swarm optimization (PSO), tabu search (TS) and simulated annealing (SA), and four recently invented metaheuristic algorithms, namely, improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO), improved harmony search (IHS), improved harmony search-based simulated annealing (IHSBSA), and artificial bee swarm optimization (ABSO), are applied to the system and the results are compared in terms of the TAC. The proposed methods are applied to a real case study and the results are discussed. It can be seen that not only average results produced by ABSO are more promising than those of the other algorithms but also ABSO has the most robustness. Also considering LPSPmax set to 5%, the PV/battery is the most cost-effective hybrid system, and in other LPSPmax values, the PV/WT/battery is the most cost-effective systems. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.