This paper addresses the load aspects in the wide area controller (WAC) design. Since the WAC design requires full system description, appropriate load modelling may be critical in the WAC design. Therefore, a mathematical framework is developed to carry out WAC design in the presence of multiple types of load. Both static and dynamic loads are considered. In order to exempt the dynamic load states from the input of WAC, the structurally constrained H2-norm optimized WAC design is performed. By recognizing the practical difficulty of obtaining the precise information about actual load composition, this paper further investigates the suitability of representing all the loads as constant power loads in the WAC design. Detailed case studies are performed on the IEEE 39-bus system. © 2016 IEEE.