This paper proposes a systematic method to develop short-term electrical load forecasting systems using neuro-fuzzy models. The proposed system predicts the electrical loads with the lead times of 1 hour, 24 hour, and 168 hour. To do so, the 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. 96 initial structures are constructed for each prediction lead time. 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 prediction modell. To improve the performance of the prediction system in terms of accuracy and reliability at the same time, the prediction model employs only two inputs. It makes possible to interpret the fuzzy rules to be learned. In order to demonstrate the viability of the proposed method, we develop a load forecasting system by using the real load data collected during 1996 and 1997 at KEPCO. Simulation results reveal that the prediction system developed in this paper can achieve a remarkable improvement on both accuracy and reliability