The increasing penetration of intermittent wind power affects the secure operation of power systems and leads to a requirement of robust and economic generation scheduling. This paper presents an optimal day-ahead wind-thermal generation scheduling method that considers the statistical and predicted features of wind speeds. In this method, the statistical analysis of historical wind data, which represents the local wind regime, is first implemented. Then, according to the statistical results and the predicted wind power, the spinning reserve requirements for the scheduling period are calculated. Based on the calculated spinning reserve requirements, the wind-thermal generation scheduling is finally conducted. To validate the program, a verified study is performed on a test system. Then, numerical studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method are conducted. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.