In the present electricity market, where renewable energy power plants have been included in the power systems, there is a lot of unpredictability in the demand and generation. There are many conventional and evolutionary programming techniques used for solving the unit commitment (UC) problem. Dynamic programming (DP) is a conventional algorithm used to solve the deterministic problem. In this paper DP is used to solve the stochastic model of UC problem. The stochastic modeling for load and generation side has been formulated using an approximate state decision approach. The programs were developed in a MATLAB environment and were extensively tested for a four-unit eight-hour system. The results obtained from these techniques were validated with the available literature and outcome was good. The commitment is in such a way that the total cost is minimal. The novelty of this paper lies in the fact that DP is used for solving the stochastic UC problem. © 2013 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.