<abstract> <p>Compared with the land power grid, power capacity of ship power system is small, its power load has randomness. Ship power load forecasting is of great significance for the stability and safety of ship power system. Support vector machine (SVM) load forecasting algorithm is a common method of ship power load forecasting. In this paper, water flow velocity, wind speed and ship speed are used as the features of SVM to train the load forecasting algorithm, which strengthens the correlation between features and predicted values. At the same time, regularization parameter C and standardization parameter σ of SVM has a great influence on the prediction accuracy. Therefore, the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to optimize these two parameters in real time to form a new improved particle swarm optimization support vector machine algorithm (IPSO-SVM), which reduces the load forecasting error, improves the prediction accuracy of ship power load, and improves the performance of ship energy management system.</p> </abstract>