  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 evolving climate
extremes on renewable generation, and transmission and distribution networks.
The model is validated by the 2022 Puerto Rico catastrophic blackout during
Hurricane Fiona, the first-ever system-wide blackout event with complete
weather-induced outage records. The model presents a novel resilience pattern
that was not captured by the present state-of-the-art models and reveals that
early failure of certain critical components surprisingly enhances overall
system resilience. Sensitivity analysis of various behind-the-meter solar
integration scenarios 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 additional
flexibility resources can exacerbate the failure probability due to
substantially enlarged energy imbalances.
