This paper proposes a systematic method to develop short-term electrical load forecasting systems using neuro-fuzzy models. The primary goal of the proposed method is to improve the performance of the prediction model in terms of accuracy and reliability. For this, the proposed method explores the advantages of the structure learning of the neuro-fuzzy model. The proposed load forecasting system first builds an initial structure off-line for each hour of four day types and then stores the resultant initial structures in the initial structure bank. Whenever a prediction needs to be made, the proposed system initializes the neuro-fuzzy model with the appropriate initial structure stored and trains the initialized model. In order to demonstrate the viability of the proposed method, we develop an one hour ahead load forecasting system by using the real load data collected during 1993 and 1994 at KEPCO. Simulation results reveal that the prediction system developed in this paper can achieve a remarkable improvement on both accuracy and reliability compared with the prediction systems based on multilayer perceptrons, radial basis function networks, and neuro-fuzzy models without the structure learning.