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Component / Mid importance

Infrastructure age

Asset-age and replacement-need composite from public capital plans and capital improvement schedules.

What it captures

Infrastructure age measures the replacement-need pressure on a utility's physical asset base. Older systems carry higher capital obligations, more frequent breaks, and tighter operational margins, all of which correspond to elevated Infrastructure readiness.

The component reads asset-age data from public capital plans and capital improvement schedules. The headline metric is the proportion of the asset base older than fifty years, which roughly maps to the design life of the cast-iron mains and concrete reservoirs that dominate the older U.S. utility asset base.

Legacy industrial Northeast and Midwest cities score uniformly high on this component because their core assets predate the mid-twentieth century in most cases.

Source categories

  • Public capital plans and capital improvement schedules
  • Bond-disclosure capital improvement extracts
  • Industry-cohort age-distribution baselines

Specific dataset identifiers and feed names are not published. Subscribers can request the full source list under NDA.

Refresh cadence

Annual

Importance class

Mid importance

Specific weight not published.

Why this importance class

Infrastructure age is highly correlated with the financial-distress and funding-gap components but is not redundant with them. A utility can be financially strong with very aging infrastructure, or financially distressed without particularly old infrastructure.

Edge cases

  • Recently-rebuilt systems read as new but the operational maturity of the new asset base may not yet be established.
  • Utilities without itemized capital plans inherit the regional cohort median.

See it applied

The Infrastructure age component shows up on every utility scoring panel in the live workspace and on every dossier. Read the national rankings (sanitized demo) to see component scores ranked across the cohort, or read the curated dossiers for the analyst-authored read on how the component drives a P3 case at named municipalities.