Price-based unit commitment is one of bidding strategies which a Genco may take in a practical manner. For that purpose, it is required for a Genco to decide output levels of its generators at each trade period. In this paper, an economic dispatch of thermal units is proposed considering the quantity of reserve contracts. A gradient projection algorithm is adopted as an optimization tool. A direct form of a projection matrix without any calculation of matrix inverse and multiplications is induced. Besides, it is proved that there is no need to check one of the two optimality conditions in the gradient projection method, which also requires matrix inverse and multiplications.