Beneath 36 steel canopies over a theme park’s asphalt, 22,908 panels went live in October, and the lot produces more power than the rides upstairs consume all year
At the edge of Los Angeles County, a parking lot the size of dozens of football fields used to just bake.
Now it hums.
Thirty six steel canopy structures stretch over roughly 4,315 parking spaces.
The battery’s 8 megawatt hour capacity, while large for a commercial site, is still a fraction of what a packed park burns through in an evening.
Their undersides are lined with bifacial glass.
On October 1, the switch flipped and the whole system began sending power into the grid for the first time.
Why does a parking lot carport out produce rooftop panels on the buildings it shadows?
Why a parking lot beats a roof for solar power
A carport sits higher and wider than almost any roofline, so its panels catch sun from more angles across more hours of the day. The elevated steel frames at Six Flags Magic Mountain lift the modules well above the cars, which matters because the bifacial panels can harvest sunlight from overhead and from light reflected off the asphalt lot below.
That reflected light is the quiet trick. Black asphalt radiates heat and glare all afternoon, and instead of wasting it, the underside of each bifacial cell converts a slice of that bounce into extra electrons. So the pavement itself becomes part of the generating surface, not just the thing the canopy happens to sit over.
Even so, none of it would matter at this scale without the footprint. A theme park lot has none of a roof’s obstructions, no vents, no HVAC units, no shade from taller buildings. That open expanse let engineers fit nearly 23,000 panels across one mostly flat surface without redesigning a single building.
The scale behind the shade
The numbers describe something closer to a small power plant than a parking amenity. Six Flags Magic Mountain is putting its parking lots to work with a new 12.37 megawatt solar installation, California’s largest solar carport. The project installs 22,908 RECOM bifacial solar panels across 36 carport structures, spanning roughly 637,000 square feet and shading about 4,315 parking spaces, 3,544 for guests and 771 for employees.
Backing it up is a 2 megawatt, 8 megawatt hour battery storage system, plus 109 charging connectors across the guest and employee lots.
Together the battery and the panels are meant to smooth the gap between when the sun shines and when the rides actually need the power, the same challenge forecasting tools now help grid operators manage elsewhere in the solar fleet.
What the measured output actually shows
The headline figure is annual, not instantaneous, and it is worth being precise about what was measured versus modeled. The system will generate about 20.8 million kWh of electricity annually and includes a 2 MW/8 MWh battery storage system. That figure comes from the system’s rated output across a full year of Southern California sun, not a single day’s reading.
Six Flags Magic Mountain park president Brian Oerding called the project a milestone in the park’s sustainability push, according to a company release on the project. The project took over three years of planning and construction before the park switched on the power, joining a short list of outsized parking lot arrays nationally, alongside projects like the rooftop array powering a Maryland convention center, though that one sits on a roof built for crowds rather than asphalt built for cars.
Where the design still has limits
No carport this size runs in isolation, and Six Flags has been careful to say so. The 12.37 megawatt system does not take Magic Mountain off the grid.
The parks are still connected to the utility Southern California Edison, and they can draw grid power when onsite generation falls short and export surplus electricity when onsite demand and available battery storage are covered. That matters most on the days a theme park actually needs power the hardest, since peak attendance often falls on hot, crowded summer afternoons, exactly when air conditioning and ride motors draw hardest.
The battery’s 8 megawatt hour capacity, while large for a commercial site, is still a fraction of what a packed park burns through in an evening. So the grid connection is not a backup plan, it is the actual operating model, and panels generate nothing after dark, which is precisely when a theme park’s lights and night rides often run hardest.
What the asphalt taught the industry
Six Flags is framing this as more than a sustainability line item. Ultimately, the plan is to offset 100% of annual electricity consumption across both the theme park and its neighboring water park, since solar panels need none of the water that fossil generation does to produce the same megawatt hour.
Solar Optimum has framed the collaboration in similar terms, describing renewable energy solutions that help organizations meet sustainability goals while delivering lasting environmental and economic benefits.
Developers elsewhere are watching this model closely, including smaller rural utilities weighing their own acquisitions of existing solar capacity rather than building new arrays from scratch. What the Magic Mountain lot ultimately proves is less about theme parks and more about pavement, since every mall, stadium and airport garage sitting empty under open sky is, in theory, the same opportunity, waiting for someone to put steel legs under a parking lot and let the asphalt do double duty.
Hugo is an engineer with strong technical expertise. Multilingual from an early age, his writing combines technical clarity with a strong interest in science and energy.
