Abstract
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.
Acknowledgements
L.X., N.L., A.C.S., and C.Y.B. disclose support for the research of this work from the US National Science Foundation under grant number 2103754 (as part of the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub, with contribution number 102), and from The Sustainability of Our Planet fund of Princeton University. L.X., N.L., and H.V.P. also disclose support for the research of this work by the grants from Princeton’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment.
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Xu, L., Lin, N., Perera, A.T.D. et al. Climate change exacerbates disparities of energy resilience in New York City. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73247-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-73247-1
