Accurate forecasting of electricity load has been one of the most important issues in the electricity industry. Recently, along with power system privatization and deregulation, accurate forecast of electricity load has received increasing attention. Because of the general nonlinear mapping capabilities of forecasting, artificial neural networks have played a crucial role in forecasting electricity load. Support vector machines (SVMs) have been successfully employed to solve nonlinear regression and time series problems. However, SVMs have rarely been applied to forecast electricity load. This investigation elucidates the feasibility of using SVMs to forecast electricity load. Moreover, simulated annealing (SA) algorithms were employed to choose the parameters of a SVM model. Subsequently, examples of electricity load data from Taiwan were used to illustrate the proposed SVMSA (support vector machines with simulated annealing) model. The empirical results reveal that the proposed model outperforms the other two models, namely the auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model and the general regression neural networks (GRNN) model. Consequently, the SVMSA model provides a promising alternative for forecasting electricity load. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.