Why infrastructure project data needs a standard format — and what we’re doing about it

Every participant in an infrastructure transaction has the same complaint about project data.

Developers complain that each counterparty asks for the same information in a different format. Investors complain that the data rooms they receive are structurally incomparable across deals. Lenders complain that what passes the bankability bar in one portfolio reappears, differently organized, in the next.

Everyone is describing the same underlying problem: the data is there, but it has no shape.

The cost of having no standard

Standardization of project data is not a cosmetic concern. It is the single largest source of friction in institutional capital’s engagement with the renewables and infrastructure asset class. It lengthens diligence timelines. It suppresses transaction velocity. It forces every buyer to rebuild the same analytical apparatus from scratch for every deal. And it means that the real patterns — across regions, across vintages, across technologies — are almost impossible to observe.

For a founder-led advisory firm like ours, this is a daily experience. We see the same documents, reorganized by hand, inside every diligence.

What a standard would look like

A usable standard is not a rigid template. It is:

• A well-defined schema for the objects that matter — plants, authorizations, contracts, counterparties, financials, operational records.
• Source-linked values — every extracted data point carries a pointer back to its original document and page.
• Confidence metadata — for each value, an explicit statement of how reliable the extraction is and why.
• Machine-readable — exportable to JSON or an equivalent structured format so downstream systems (risk models, portfolio trackers, regulatory reporting) can consume it without manual intervention.

None of these properties are exotic. They are simply non-negotiable if the data is ever going to become a real asset.

AIP Engine

AIP Engine is our first attempt to deliver that shape. It ingests unstructured project data packages — PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, photographs — and produces a structured Dossier Digitale Strutturato (DDS) that conforms to the schema we have been developing on live engagements.

The product is deliberately narrow at this stage. It serves the first users we understand best: investors running acquisition-side due diligence on Italian renewable assets, asset managers onboarding new mandates, and lenders reviewing bankability for project finance.

We expect the schema to evolve. We expect the input coverage to expand. We do not expect the underlying conviction to change: infrastructure data needs a standard format, and the most credible way to build one is from the receiving end of the transaction, not from the issuing end.

If any of this resonates — either as a user of a product like this, or as a collaborator on the schema itself — we would like to hear from you.