As the development of smart grids is increasing, accurate electric load demand forecasting is becoming more important for power systems, because it plays a vital role to improve the performance of power companies in terms of less operating cost and reliable operation. Short-term load forecasting (STLF), which focuses on the prediction of few hours to one week ahead predictions and is also beneficial for unit commitment and cost-effective operation of smart power grids, is receiving increasing attention these days. Development and selection of an accurate forecast model from different artificial intelligence (AI)-based techniques and meta-heuristic algorithms for better accuracy is a challenging task. Deep Neural Network (DNN) is a group of intelligent computational algorithms which have a viable approach for modeling across multiple hidden layers and complex nonlinear relationships between variables. In this paper, a model for STLF using deep learning neural network (DNN) with feature selection is proposed. A wide range of intelligent forecast models was designed and tested based on multiple activation functions, such as hyperbolic tangent (tanh), different variants of rectifier linear unit (ReLU), and sigmoid. Among the others, DNN with leaky ReLu produced the best forecast accuracy. Regarding the precision of the methods used in this research work, certain output measures, such as absolute percentage error (MAPE), mean square error (MSE), and root mean square error (RMSE) are used. There was also a reliance on multiple parametric and variable details to determine the capability of the smart load forecasting techniques. © 2022 Badar ul Islam and Shams Forruque Ahmed.