Abstract: Given the expanding power grid and investment scale, it becomes especially important to research power grid enterprises' investment capacity. From the viewpoint of managers, in order to grasp the development trend of future investment, it is advisable to consider both internal and external factors which affect investment ability, and moreover to study the influence mechanism between them. Apart from this, it can establish a foundation for decision makers to adjust investment capacity. From the perspective of enterprise finance and the macro point of view of social economy, this paper builds a reasonable investment ability index system of influencing factors combining with a province's historical data from 2005 to 2013. Then based on the theory of grey clustering analysis and path analysis methods, we exploit SPSS software to realize modeling process and get the results. The results show that: (1) Factors which affect the ability of the power grid enterprise investment can be divided into six classes according to the grey clustering. (2) The most direct impact comes from depreciation, financing and profit, among which financing makes the greatest influence and profits ranks the second. They have both direct and indirect effects on investment capacity. (3) The assets and liabilities of power grid enterprises are relatively high, which will increase the risk of operation and investment of enterprises. In the future development and management, the enterprises should strengthen the management of funds. (4) Other factors can only affect the investment ability indirectly by means of influencing one or more of the above three factors. At the same time, the influence of external factors on investment capacity cannot be ignored.

Key words: power grid enterprises, investment ability, influence mechanism, path analysis, grey clustering