The wind power generation system will play a crucial role for developing the energy conservative, environmentally friendly, and sustainable electric power system in China. However, the intermittency and unpredictability of wind power has been an obstacle to the deployment of wind power generation, especially in the winter of northern China. In northern China, a combined heat and power (CHP) unit has been widely utilized as a heat and electricity source. Considering the flexible operation of CHP with introduction of electric heat pumps (EHPs), this paper proposes a new method of electricity and heating demand side management to facilitate the wind power integration with the purpose of energy conservation in a unit-commitment problem. The thermal characteristics of demand side such as the thermal inertia of buildings and thermal comfort of end users are taken into consideration. Moreover the distributed electric heat pumps (EHPs) widely used by city dwellers are introduced into the wind-thermal power system as the heating source and spinning reserve so as to increase the flexibility of heating and electricity supply. The simulation results show that the new method can integrate more wind power into power grid for electricity and heating demand to reduce the coal consumption. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.