This paper presents the use of a Support Vector Machine load predictive energy management system to control the energy flow between a solar energy source, a supercapacitor-battery hybrid energy storage combination and the load. The supercapacitor-battery hybrid energy storage system is deployed in a solar energy system to improve the reliability of delivered power. The combination of batteries and supercapacitors makes use of complementary characteristic that allow the overlapping of a battery's high energy density with a supercapacitors' high power density. This hybrid system produces a straightforward benefit over either individual system, by taking advantage of each characteristic. When the supercapacitor caters for the instantaneous peak power which prolongs the battery lifespan, it also minimizes the system cost and ensures a greener system by reducing the number of batteries. The resulting performance is highly dependent on the energy controls implemented in the system to exploit the strengths of the energy storage devices and minimize its weaknesses. It is crucial to use energy from the supercapacitor and therefore minimize jeopardizing the power system reliability especially when there is a sudden peak power demand. This study has been divided into two stages. The first stage is to obtain the optimum SVM load prediction model, and the second stage carries out the performance comparison of the proposed SVM-load predictive energy management system with conventional sequential programming control (if-else condition). An optimized load prediction classification model is investigated and implemented. This C-Support Vector Classification yields classification accuracy of 100% using 17 support vectors in 0.004866 s of training time. The Polynomial kernel is the optimum kernel in our experiments where the C and g values are 2 and 0.25 respectively. However, for the load profile regression model which was implemented in the K-step ahead of load prediction, the radial basis function (RBF) kernel was chosen due to the highest squared correlation coefficient and the lowest mean squared error. Results obtained shows that the proposed SVM load predictive energy management system accurately identifies and predicts the load demand. This has been justified by the supercapacitor charging and leading the peak current demand by 200 ms for different load profiles with different optimized regression models. This methodology optimizes the cost of the system by reducing the amount of power electronics within the hybrid energy storage system, and also prolongs the batteries' lifespan as previously mentioned. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.