In order to realize the reliable, safety, economic, efficiency, In order to realize the reliable, safety, economic, efficiency and environmental friendly of electric grid, the smart grid is the inevitable choice. It is of great significance for the smart grid development to study hierarchy and relationship of its influencing factors. By taking the influencing factors of the smart grid development as the research object, the interpretative structural model was used to analyze the influencing factors of the smart grid development. The results show that the influencing factors contain 29 elements distributed in 6 layers: the electric power electronics technology, demand of electric power quality, pressure of resource and environment, political and economic environment, natural disasters threat are the deepest layer influencing factors; power system comprehensive intelligent programming techniques, smart grid dispatching technology, intelligent distribution automation technology, intelligent household and intelligent power consumption community, superconducting technology, multi-objective optimal control strategies are the directly influencing factors of the smart grid development; other factors in the middle layers, which play the cross cohesion function.