In the smart grid (SG) era, the energy resource management (ERM) in power systems is facing an increase in complexity, mainly due to the high penetration of distributed resources, such as renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs). Therefore, advanced control techniques and sophisticated planning tools are required to take advantage of the benefits that SG technologies can provide. In this paper, we introduce a new approach called multi-dimensional signaling evolutionary algorithm (MDS-EA) to solve the large-scale ERM problem in SGs. The proposed method uses the general framework from evolutionary algorithms (EAs), combined with a previously proposed rule-based mechanism called multi-dimensional signaling (MDS). In this way, the proposed MDS-EA evolves a population of solutions by modifying variables of interest identified during the evaluation process. Results show that the proposed method can reduce the complexity of metaheuristics implementation while achieving competitive solutions compared with EAs and deterministic approaches in acceptable times.