Flexible load regulations of thermal power units are one of the key approaches to increase the wind power utilization in power systems. Power units under flexible load regulations have higher coal consumption rates than those in normal operating modes

while such characteristics are not captured by existing power system dispatch models. In this paper

a unit commitment model considering thermal power units in flexible load regulations is presented

and coal consumption rates of flexible units are characterized by using piecewise linear functions. The model is solved by using existing mixed integer linear programming(MILP) methods. Then

numerical examples on the IEEE 30-bus system with practical wind farm and thermal power unit data are presented. The verification results demonstrate that

the flexible load regulations of thermal power units can substantially improve the wind power utilization and reduce the generation costs.