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Climate extremes, such as hurricanes, combined with large-scale integration of environment-sensitive renewables, could exacerbate the risk of widespread power outages. We introduce a coupled climate-energy model for cascading power outages, which comprehensively captures the impacts of climate extremes on renewable generation, and transmission and distribution networks. The model is validated with the 2022 Puerto Rico catastrophic blackout during Hurricane Fiona – a unique system-wide blackout event with complete records of weather-induced outages. The model reveals a resilience pattern that was not captured by the previous models: early failure of certain critical components enhances overall system resilience. Sensitivity analysis on various scenarios of behind-the-meter solar integration demonstrates that lower integration levels (below 45%, including the current level) exhibit minimal impact on system resilience in this event. However, surpassing this critical level without pairing it with energy storage can exacerbate the probability of catastrophic blackouts. 

Climate extremes increasingly threaten energy infrastructure, yet whether disparities in energy resilience persist within cities under comparable hazard exposure and how distributed energy resources may reshape them remain largely unquantified. By integrating climate and energy projections, socio-demographic data, and an optimization-based power outage metric that captures initial outages, recovery, and distributed energy resource support, this study reveals evident energy resilience disparities shaped by intersectionality across income, race, and ethnicity in New York City. These disparities are projected to be exacerbated under future climates. Middle-income households exhibit the lowest levels of energy resilience, with their outage risk increasing by 1.5-2 times compared to the wealthiest households under severe events. Low- and middle-income Asian and high-income Black households experience up to twice the average outage risk increase compared to others within the same income groups. While distributed energy resources can partially mitigate disparities, their impact remains limited under business-as-usual growth. Our findings identify climate-vulnerable communities and inform efforts to promote energy justice in a changing climate.