Combined cooling, heating, and power (CCHP) is an economic and eco-friendly technology to mitigate energy issues with remarkable energy efficiency improvement. This study formulates a mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) model for a combined CCHP system coupled with renewable energy, i.e. RCCHP system, which is applied in five different buildings to evaluate the economic and environmental performance under two optimization modes. Net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR) and dynamic payback period (DPP) are introduced as economic indexes, while CO2 emission reduction rate (CER) is considered as the environmental indicator to determine the optimal combination, capacity, and operation strategies for energy technologies. Results indicate that a combination of electricity purchased at valley period during night with power generated by the combined heating and power (CHP) unit coupled with wind turbine in peak period during daytime is cost-optimal which also enables higher energy efficiency. Meanwhile, the feed-in tariff as well as the uncoordinated electrical and thermal loads both show a significant impact on real-time operation strategies. Compared with the reference separate production (SP) system, the combined system shows better performance when applied to shopping mall under both optimization modes, e.g., with NPV up to 67.65 and 46.61 million RMB, IRR up to 20.70% and 25.10%, and the minimum DPP is 5.49 and 4.82 years under NPV and IRR maximization, respectively. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.