When Your Client Doesn’t Know What They Need: How Engineers Plan Outdoor Power for the Long Haul

Most municipalities know what they want their outdoor spaces to look like. They have renderings, landscape plans, and a vision for how the community will use the space. What they often haven’t figured out — at least not yet — is how they’re going to power it.

That gap between vision and infrastructure is exactly where Katrina Lopez does some of her most important work.

Lopez is a project manager and engineer at Ciorba Group, a Chicago-area civil consulting firm that works with local municipalities, IDOT, tollway authorities, and utility clients across the region. She specializes in electrical design for streetscape, parks, and infrastructure projects — and she’s worked behind the scenes at enough large outdoor events to understand how power planning plays out in the real world, not just on paper. We sat down with her to talk about how she approaches outdoor electrical infrastructure for community spaces, and what gets missed when engineers aren’t thinking far enough ahead.

The Pickleball Problem (and Why It’s Actually a Power Problem)

If you’ve been paying attention to outdoor recreation trends, you’ve noticed pickleball everywhere. Communities across the country are adding courts at a rapid pace — and they’re doing it with one eye on the courts and another on the surrounding amenities. That’s where the electrical planning gets interesting.

Lopez was recently brought in by her longtime mentor Tony — a veteran engineer at Christopher B. Burke Engineering — to design a pickleball project for the Village of Elmwood Park, Illinois. The project was bigger than just the courts themselves.

“There’s a lot of events they host in that circle area,” Lopez explains, referring to the community parkway adjacent to the courts. “We were talking about them installing the pickleball courts and how we’re going to power it, and there was a desire to do some kind of twist lock connection so that they could host events there.”

Twist lock connections are a key detail for communities that want to host vendor events, farmers markets, and festivals in the same space where kids are playing pickleball on a Tuesday afternoon. Without planning for both use cases upfront, you end up doing expensive retrofits later — or telling a vendor at a weekend market that you can’t power their booth.

For the Elmwood Park project, Lopez specified a Pedoc power pedestal with twist lock capability — a product her mentor hadn’t even known about until she showed it to him.

“He was floored,” she says. “He said, ‘How do I not know about this?’ And I was like, neener, neener — I know about it and you don’t.”

Beyond the satisfaction of introducing a new tool to a trusted colleague, the outcome was practical: a sleek, UL-listed pedestal that could handle event loads without looking out of place in a well-designed public space. “It’s not going to be super big and will look kind of nice and integrate very well into the site,” Lopez says.

Why “We Don’t Know” Is Actually a Starting Point

Most engineers will tell you that getting clear scope from a municipal client is one of the harder parts of the job. Lopez has built an approach around it.

When a community says they’re not sure what events they’ll host, she doesn’t wait for clarity. She draws on years of experience — including time spent working behind the scenes at large Chicago-area outdoor events, physically making electrical connections alongside her family — to build out a power plan that anticipates what the community is likely to want, even if they can’t articulate it yet.

“Most communities have no idea what they want, literally no idea,” she says. “So it’s me doing that work for them — drawing on years and years of doing these types of projects.”

Her process involves asking a series of probing questions: What types of events are you considering? Will you have food vendors? Are there going to be outdoor performances? Do you want to do holiday lighting reveals? Each answer reshapes the load calculation and the infrastructure design.

And if a client still can’t answer? Lopez defaults to giving them more power than they think they need.

“I just give them a bunch of power with a bunch of capabilities. Because I know once you get this space, you’re going to start hosting all these events.”

One community came back to her after the fact and said they wished they’d done a few things differently — but also acknowledged she’d given them enough electrical capacity to handle it anyway. That’s the goal: infrastructure that’s ready for what the client doesn’t know yet.

Zone Planning: Not All Loads Are Equal

One of the more practical principles Lopez applies to event-ready outdoor spaces is zone planning — designating areas based on expected electrical load rather than treating the whole site as uniform.

On a project in Bloomingdale, Illinois, she knew the community planned to host festivals with food vendors. She designated specific areas near centralized power sources to accommodate high-draw equipment, and positioned lower-demand vendors — arts and crafts booths, informational tables — elsewhere.

“If they needed higher power and more connections, they were going to be kind of centralized in certain areas where we could provide that kind of power,” she explains. “And then everybody else who just had minimal power needs were somewhere else.”

This kind of intentional layout makes a real difference when event day arrives. It reduces circuit loading, simplifies distribution, and gives event organizers a logical framework for vendor placement.

What This Means for Anyone Specifying Outdoor Power

Whether you’re an engineer, an architect, a parks director, or a community planner, Lopez’s approach points to a few consistent principles worth carrying into any outdoor project:

• Plan for the events you haven’t scheduled yet. If a space will host any kind of community programming, build in twist lock connections and enough circuit capacity to support vendor loads — even if the calendar is empty today.
• Designate zones by load type. Concentrate high-draw power in planned vendor corridors. Don’t distribute it evenly across a site without thinking through what will actually connect where.
• Ask the hard questions early. What vendors are expected? Will there be food? Music? Lighting reveals? Each of those answers changes the infrastructure requirements significantly.
• Over-provision rather than under-build. Retrofitting electrical after a space is finished is expensive and disruptive. Give the space room to grow.

Outdoor Power Planning for Municipalities

Product selection matters here too — not just for aesthetics, but for long-term usability and code compliance. Lopez notes that a product can look great on paper and still be unspecifiable if it doesn’t meet code requirements. For her, UL listing, in-use covers, stainless steel construction, and the ability to customize configurations are what make a pedestal actually usable on a project — not just attractive in a catalog.

The pickleball courts will get built. The events will eventually fill the calendar. The question is whether the electrical infrastructure will be ready when they do. With the right planning up front, it will be.