Renewable energy sources (RESs) are a great source of power generation for microgrids with expeditious urbanization and increase in demand in the energy sector. One of the significant challenges in deploying RESs with microgrids is efficient energy management. Optimizing the power allocation among various available generation units to serve the load is the best way to achieve efficient energy management. This paper proposes a cost-effective multi-verse optimizer algorithm (CMVO) to solve this optimization problem. CMVO focuses on the optimal sharing of generated power in a microgrid between different available sources to reduce the generation cost. The proposed algorithm is analyzed for two different scale microgrids (IEEE 37-node test system and IEEE 141-node test system) using IEEE test feeder standards to assess its performance. The results show that CMVO outperforms multi-verse optimizer (MVO), particle swarm optimization (PSO), artificial hummingbird algorithm (AHA), and genetic algorithm (GA). The simulation results emphasize the cost reduction and execution time improvement in both IEEE test systems compared with other meta-heuristic algorithms. © 2023 by the authors.