Institutional Real Estate, Inc. held its eighth annual Institutional Investing in Infrastructure conference and fifth annual I3 Editorial Advisory Board meeting in Half Moon Bay, Calif., in October. And as luck would have it, the Golden State’s normally reliable coastal cloud cover was absent. It was fitting for an asset class with many new investors trying to make sense of its multitude of subsectors, risk profiles, geographies, political and regulatory environments, and investment structures; this year, it seemed for many, the fog had lifted.

This is not to say a lot of unknowns don’t remain, but at least more of these are becoming known unknowns, and the questions being raised are moving on from “what is infrastructure” in the basic sense — toll roads, airports, transmission lines, etc. — and have more to do with how infrastructure f