<?Pub Dtl?>Standalone microgrids with renewable sources and battery storage play an important role in solving power supply problems in remote areas such as islands. To achieve reliable and economic operations of a standalone microgrid, in addition to the consideration of utilization of renewable resources, the lifetime characteristics of a battery energy storage system also need to be fully investigated. In this paper, in order to realize the economic operation of a recently developed standalone microgrid on Dongfushan Island in China, an optimization model including battery life loss cost, operation and maintenance cost, fuel cost, and environmental cost is established to obtain a set of optimal parameters of operation strategy. Considering the lifetime characteristics of lead–acid batteries, a multiobjective optimization to minimize power generation cost and to maximize the useful life of lead–acid batteries has been achieved via the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA-II). The results show that the proposed method can optimize the system operations under different scenarios and help users obtain the optimal operation schemes of the actual microgrid system.