This paper aims to study the application of distributed generation technologies on a naval energy system, investigating the best operating strategy for energy management throughout an annual load profile. The thermo-economic analysis is performed considering electrical and thermal load demands referred to hotel and service loads of a cruise ship (around 6 MWel), both variable with the season and the period of the day, taking into account the off-design curves and cost functions for the different generators. Four different solutions are investigated, comparing the operative strategies in terms of energy efficiency, CO2 emissions and annual costs. The analysis is performed with dedicated software for the thermo-economic time dependent analysis, developed by the University of Genoa. The thermo-economic approach has general validity, thus it can be also applied to different kinds of ships, even considering different technologies for energy generation and storage. (C) 2018 Hydrogen Energy Publications LLC. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.