The linear active disturbance approach is employed to deal with the load frequency control issue of a single area wind power system based on doubly fed induction generator, and the performance of the control law is optimized by using the bat-inspired algorithm. The load frequency control issue has become more challenging in a complex power system based on wind energy conversion system due to the varying feature of the wind penetration, and sustaining the balance between the power generation and demand by rejecting the internal uncertainties in the process model and the external disturbances simultaneously. In the framework of the presented linear active disturbance rejection control approach, by constructing an extended state observer, the total disturbance, including all the unmodelled dynamics in the process model and the external disturbances, can be estimated in real time and then compensated by a simple linear PD control law. The controller parameters tuning is then simplified into the optimization of the two bandwidths: observer bandwidth, and the controller bandwidth. Then, this issue can be achieved by employing the heuristic modified bat inspired algorithm based on the optimization of the proposed performance index. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by the extensive simulation examples of the load frequency control issue involved in the single area power system, taking into account different wind penetration, as well as the external disturbances. The performance robustness of the proposed approach against the parameters perturbation in the process model is also demonstrated via the Monte-Carlo method. The performance superiority of the proposed approach over the conventional Proportional Integral and Fuzzy-Proportional Integral based controller even in the presence of external disturbances and uncertainty in power system parameters under different cases of high wind penetration is also validated from the simulation results.