The growth of internal combustion engines (ICEs) in the 20th century had a profound impact on transportation and industrialization. However, current concerns over pollution and emissions have led to stricter regulations and the exploration of alternative technologies to ultimately assist in decarbonizing the road transport sector.

2024 has seen a flurry of infrastructure investment activity. From allocating capital to megatrends such as digitization to more essential infrastructure projects that focus on water and waste management, investors have shown an increased appetite for the asset class. We expect this trend to continue and would point to a few key themes that we believe make private infrastructure well positioned for long-term success. 

Power generation demand is increasing at an accelerating pace. While the fastest-growing sources of new power generation are renewables, this type of generation is intermittent. Natural gas is the most flexible and economically viable source of power to maintain reliability throughout the variability in renewables’ output.

The 2024 U.S. presidential election has ushered in a new Republican administration, raising questions about the future of renewable-energy subsidies under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). While president-elect Donald Trump has suggested revisiting unspent IRA funds, we believe the economic and political realities make significant retroactive changes to renewables subsidies unlikely.

Intuitively, we tend to assume that an investment manager who consistently has outperformed the benchmark is likely to continue to outperform the benchmark. We also tend to assume that a manager with its own capital at risk is more likely to have its interests aligned with the interests of its investor clients. To the best of my knowledge, there’s absolutely zero evidence to support either of these contentions.

From computing power to fiber connectivity, traditional energy to renewables and even nuclear power, data protection and digital sovereignty, and not least of all geopolitics and the (re)shaping of global digital infrastructure architecture, topics closely related to data centers have become almost daily news as the world enters the fourth industrial — or AI — revolution.

Access to sustainability data and ensuring high-quality data are critical in the infrastructure investment industry. But how are firms operationalizing this data to effectively improve their sustainability and increase the value of their portfolio assets?