One of the significant problems in demand response (DR) participation in the smart power system is calculating how much electrical power is required to extract from DR (
∆PDR) to keep the power system frequency in the allowable range. Calculating the precise amount of this value is impossible due to the random nature of load disturbance (LoD). In this paper, a new method is presented to control the DR participation in the load frequency control considering communication time delay. Extended State Observer is used to estimate the magnitude of the LoD, considering the structural uncertainty of the power system parameters. Then, the DR program is implemented in load frequency control to compensate the whole or part of LoD considering the available electrical power at the aggregators (PAV‐AGG) and communication time delay. Afterward, Active Disturbance Rejection Control is modified and adopted to control the uncompensated LoD. The salp swarm algorithm is employed to design the parameters of the proposed method, which is verified in comparison with the previous methods. The results demonstrate that the presented approach has potentially significant performance, assisting the power system frequency to be damped immediately with the small overshoot and undershoot.