The global demand for electricity has visualized high growth with the rapid growth in population and economy. It thus becomes necessary to efficiently distribute electricity to households and industries in order to reduce power loss. Smart Grids (SG) have the potential to reduce such power losses during power distribution. Machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques have been successfully implemented on SGs to achieve enhanced accuracy in customer demand prediction. There exists a dire need to analyze and evaluate the various machine learning algorithms, thereby identify the most suitable one to be applied to SGs. In the present work, several state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms, namely Support Vector Machines (SVM), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Logistic Regression, Naive Bayes, Neural Networks, and Decision Tree classifier, have been deployed for predicting the stability of the SG. The SG dataset used in the study is publicly available collected from UC Irvine (UCI) machine learning repository. The experimentation results highlighted the superiority of the Decision Tree classification algorithm, which outperformed the other state of the art algorithms yielding 100% precision, 99.9% recall, 100% F1 score, and 99.96% accuracy. © 2021 John Wiley & Sons Ltd