Due to its great economic benefit, the demand for utilizing combined heat and power (CHP) systems has increased. Many facilities and buildings need to be supplied with both energy and heat. Usually, CHP systems are used with other systems that only produce power or heat. The economic dispatch (ED) problem for the CHP systems, which seek to minimize the cost of fuel, is highly challenging. One of the most significant algorithms for solving the ED problem in CHP systems is the Equilibrium Optimizer (EO). This work examined the effectiveness of the EO in solving the ED in CHP systems. In this paper, the EO optimizer was applied to many different studied systems, taking into account the effect of losses and the effect of valve point in these different systems. The effectiveness of the EO solutions would be compared to other algorithms applied in some of the previous works. The proposed algorithm has high-quality solutions and superior performance compared to some solutions presented recently.