Recent deregulation of Korean electricity industry has made each power generation company pay more attention to maximizing its own profit instead of minimizing the overall system operation cost while guaranteeing system security. Electricity power generation problem is typically defined as the problem of determining both the on and off status and the power generation level of each generator under the given fuel constraints, which has been known as Profit-Based Unit Commitment (PBUC) problem. To solve the PBUC problem, the previous research mostly focused on devising Lagrangian Relaxation (LR) based heuristic algorithms due to the complexity of the problem and the nonlinearity of constraints and objectives. However, these heuristic approaches have been reported as less practical in real world applications since the computational run time is usually quite high and it may take a while to implement the devised heuristic algorithms as software applications. Especially when considering long-term planning problem which spans at least one year, the complexity becomes higher. Therefore, this paper proposes an explicit column generation algorithm using power generation patterns and the proposed algorithm is successfully applied to a Korean power generation company. The proposed scheme has a robust structure so that it is expected to extend general PBUC problems.