Aiming at addressing strong stochasticity and poor stability of power load,a load forecasting method combining factor analysis(FA)and gated recurrent unit(GRU)was proposed.First the internal logic of load data was clarified by FA to determine the influences of various conditional factors such as time,electricity price,and temperature on power load and to reduce scale and complexity of data.Then the load forecasting was modeled by combining FA and GRU.Final a case forecasting on the regional actual load in Jiangsu was carried out,which demonstrated higher forecasting accuracy and training speed of the proposed model compared with the model without dimension reduction.