Parking Lot & Site Lighting Installation & Repair in Santa Clara County

A knocked-down or storm-sheared pole is a distinct emergency, not a routine repair, because it usually leaves live conductors in an open base. The first step is always to make the circuit electrically safe — de-energizing and isolating the run before anyone works near it. Once it's safe, we rebuild: saw-cut and re-pour or repair the concrete base, set the anchor-bolt template, run new conduit and conductors, re-establish grounding, and set the new pole and fixture to NEC. This is licensed electrical work under NEC Articles 410 and 225, which is why an electrician — not a general maintenance crew — should handle it. We promise only the response time we can actually hold, and we make-safe first, every time.

You generally cannot just swap lamps. California Title 24 Part 6 §130.2 makes outdoor lighting controls mandatory: automatic daylight shutoff (a photocontrol or astronomical time-switch), automatic scheduling that steps lighting between full, a reduced level, and full-OFF, and motion or occupant sensing that reduces output on a no-occupancy timeout. The 2025 cycle, effective January 1, 2026, further requires parking areas, garages, and loading to have occupant-sensing with at least one reduced step of design power. A lamp-only retrofit that ignores these controls does not comply with current code — and it also leaves the controls portion of the utility rebate on the table. We design the controls into the retrofit from the start.

Rebates depend on which utility serves your property, and Santa Clara County is split three ways: PG&E covers most of the county, Silicon Valley Power serves the City of Santa Clara, and City of Palo Alto Utilities serves Palo Alto. The fixtures generally have to be DLC-listed to qualify, and the rebate amount follows the qualifying-products catalog and your project's kWh savings, verified at application — we don't quote a per-fixture dollar figure up front because the catalog and program terms change. The most important rule is timing: SVP requires pre-approval before purchase and install, and installing first forfeits the rebate. We run the full sequence — eligibility check, pre-approval, install, and closeout — so the incentive is captured, not lost.

It depends on the city. If your property is in the City of Santa Clara, you're served by Silicon Valley Power, a municipal utility, and your lighting rebate routes through SVP. If you're in Palo Alto, you're served by City of Palo Alto Utilities, also municipal, and your program routes through CPAU. Most other cities in the county — San Jose, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Gilroy, Morgan Hill, and others — are PG&E territory. Assuming PG&E everywhere is a common mistake that mis-routes Santa Clara and Palo Alto rebates and service coordination, so we confirm the correct utility for your specific address before filing anything.

California is on the 2025 Title 24 Part 6, effective January 1, 2026. For outdoor and parking-lot lighting, the mandatory controls under §130.2 include automatic daylight shutoff, three-state automatic scheduling (full, a reduced level, and full-OFF), and motion or occupant sensing that reduces output on a no-occupancy timeout. Parking areas, garages, and loading specifically require occupant-sensing with at least one reduced step of design power. Power for the lot is also budgeted by lighting zone — most commercial Santa Clara County sites fall in the moderate zones — and luminaires of 6,200 lumens and up must meet BUG/shielding limits per CALGreen §5.106.8 to control glare and light trespass. We bid to these requirements rather than to the superseded 2022 cycle.

In most cases, yes. Pole lighting and new circuits typically require an electrical permit and plan review, and each incorporated city runs its own permitting authority — San Jose adopts the California Electrical Code through its municipal code, with the 2025 code applying to applications on or after January 1, 2026. In unincorporated Santa Clara County, building and trade permits go through County Planning & Development, and any trenching, utility connections, or pole work in or adjacent to county right-of-way also needs a Roads & Airports encroachment permit, which must be obtained before the building permit issues. Permit fees are valuation-based and confirmed at submittal, so we don't quote a flat permit fee — we roll the actual fee into the project after the AHJ determination.

It's genuinely scope-dependent — a single failed pole reads very differently from a full-lot HID-to-LED conversion with new controls and a rebate filing. Rather than promise a fixed timeline we can't hold for your specific site, we start with an assessment: a site walk to inventory poles, fixtures, and controls, locate any faults, and map the Title 24 controls and BUG requirements. From that, you get an honest schedule alongside the quote. The recurring long-pole items are utility pre-approval (which must come before install for SVP), AHJ plan review, and any required networked-controls measurement-and-verification step after the fixtures go in.

The cheap bid usually quotes fixtures by wattage, skips the photometric layout, leaves out the Title 24 §130.2 controls, ignores pole grounding and the handhole, hand-waves the trench detail, and doesn't file the rebate. The thorough bid does the opposite: a photometric layout for foot-candle uniformity, named DLC-listed fixtures, NEC 410.30 pole grounding and handhole, NEC 300.5 underground cover and conduit detail, the mandatory controls, BUG-rated optics for your jurisdiction's dark-sky rules, and the correct utility rebate sequenced before install. The lowball looks cheaper on paper and costs more once the inspection fails or the rebate is forfeited. We bid to code minimum and note any bring-up the plans missed, so the price is defensible.