Porterville ‘Rails to Trails’

Porterville Shifts to Solar Lighting in City Parks Master Plan

Porterville is a city with a population of roughly 60,000 located in the heart of the California’s San Joaquin valley, nestled against the foothills of the Southern Sierra Nevada. In 2023 the city hired QK, a leading provider of engineering, land surveying, planning, and environmental services to California public agencies, to draft a city-wide parks master plan. The plan was published in 2024. The plan is a comprehensive document covering a broad range of interconnected topics, providing visionary guidance for the future on how to meet the demands for future recreational, programming and maintenance needs. It also established priorities for facility improvements, future park development, and park land acquisitions. A key element of the plan is to provide lighting in parks, but more specifically, solar lighting. The plan states: “Solar lighting is the preferred lighting for all new and renovated facilities”

The city of Porterville joins a growing number of cities adopting solar lighting for their parks. Providing lighted facilities for active community recreation areas extends usability. By avoiding trenching or boring, adopting solar-powered lighting can be more cost-effective than traditional line voltage lighting, especially in applications where there is great distance between the utility service pole and the lighting itself.

Rails to Trails

GBL and its solar lighting partner Clearworld, collaborated with the city on several park lighting projects including two “rails to trails” projects- the Santa Fe Byway, and Butterfield Historic Corridor. For these applications, ‘full cut-off’ IDA (International Dark Sky) solutions were used. For the Tule River Parkway application the city chose to maintain the acorn-style luminaire aesthetic in the surrounding area. In each case, the luminaires were powered by solar-integrated poles where the batteries and solar PV material is “wrapped” around the pole. Solar-integrated poles offer several practical and design advantages over conventional solar lights. Because the solar cells face multiple directions, the pole can collect sunlight from morning sun, midday sun, afternoon sun, and reflected ambient light. This can improve energy harvesting during winter, cloudy conditions and low sun-angle periods. Aesthetically, by integrating the solar elements around the pole, there is no need for a separate, large, solar module.

Solar Lighting Integrated Shade Structures

Visitors to the Butterfield “rail trail’ will be greeted by periodic resting stops spearheaded by GBL. The stops feature cleverly designed shade structures by Valmont Industries, and integrated solar lighting from GridShift. No longer just ‘shade structures’, these structures extend usability in the evening by virtue of integrated solar lights.

In Porterville, sunlight that once simply marked the passing of the day has become part of the city’s vision for tomorrow.

For more information on solar lighting, and a copy of GBL’s solar lighting design guide, contact GBL at sales@gblsolutionsinc.com