This paper presents development of a day ahead load forecasting (DALF) model for Turkish power system with an artificial neural network (ANN). Effects of special holidays including national and religious days, and hourly random load deviations observed in Turkish power system due to significant arc furnace loads are discussed. Performance of the ANN is investigated in the sense of both DALF performance - in terms of both daily mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and hourly absolute percentage error (APE) - and hourly secondary reserves required to ensure supply/demand adequacy of the system. The most sensitive cities to DALF in terms of daily city temperature forecasts are ranked in order to reduce the input of the developed ANN and thereby to improve execution of the model. Candidate cities are determined based on both their placement with respect to climatic zones of the country and their contribution to the system load during peak hours. The results show that, although a well-trained ANN could provide very satisfactory daily MAPEs at non-special days, such as ~1%, the hourly absolute percentage errors (APE) could be significant due to large random load disturbances, which necessitate special attention during the day ahead allocation of hourly secondary reserves. By limiting the temperature data set with major cities, the input of ANN reduces significantly while not disturbing the MAPEs. Main contributions of the study are; addressing both benefits of the prioritizing the cities in a power system in the sense of their temperature forecast effects on the DALF performance and assessing the performance of DALF in the sense of necessary amount of secondary reserves in power systems which include significant random load deviations (e.g., large arc furnace loads).